page_title: Poles
section_title: Culture
hierarchical_section_title: Poles / Culture
context_page_description: The Poles, commonly referred to as the Polish people, are a Central European nation native to Poland who share a common history, culture, and are speakers of the Polish language.
  The population of self-declared Poles in Poland is estimated at 37,394,000 out of an overall population of 38,538,000, of whom 36,522,000 declared Polish alone. A wide-ranging Polish diaspora exists throughout Europe, the Americas, and in Australasia. Today, the largest urban concentrations of Poles are within the Warsaw and Silesian metropolitan areas.
  The ethnic Polish people are considered to be the descendants of ancient West Slavic Lechites and other tribes that inhabited the Polish territories in late antiquity. Poland's recorded history dates back over a thousand years to c. 930–960 AD, when the Western Polans – an influential tribe in the Greater Poland region – united various Lechitic clans under what became the Piast dynasty, thus creating the first Polish state. The subsequent Christianization of Poland by the Catholic Church, in 966 CE, marked Poland's advent to the community of Western Christendom.
context_section_description: The culture of Poland has a history of 1000 years. Poland, located in Central Europe, developed a character that was influenced by its geography at the confluence of fellow Central European cultures (Austrian, Czech, German, Hungarian, and Slovak) as well as from Western European cultures (French, Spanish and Dutch), Southern European cultures (Italian and Greek), Baltic/Northeastern cultures (Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian), Eastern European cultures (Belarusian and Ukrainian) and Western Asian/Caucasian cultures (Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, and Georgian). Influences were also conveyed by immigrants (Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Jewish, German and Dutch), political alliances (with Lithuania, Hungary, Saxony, France and Sweden), eastern conquests by the Polish-Lithuanian state (Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Romania and Latvia) and conquerors of the Polish lands (the Russian Empire, Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy, later to be known as the Austrian Empire or Austria-Hungary).
  Over time, Polish culture has been greatly influenced by its ties with the Germanic, Hungarian,
  and Latinate world and other ethnic groups and minorities living in Poland. The people of Poland have traditionally been seen as hospitable to artists from abroad (especially Italy) and open to cultural and artistic trends popular in other European countries. Owing to this central location, the Poles came very early into contact with both civilizations – eastern and western, and as a result developed economically, culturally, and politically. A German general Helmut Carl von Moltke, in his Poland. A historical sketch (1885), stated that "Poland of the fifteenth century was one of the most civilised states of Europe."
  In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Polish focus on cultural advancement often took precedence over political and economic activity, experiencing severe crises, especially during World War II and in the following years. These factors have contributed to the versatile nature of Polish art, with all its complex nuances.
  Poland was for centuries a refuge to many Jews from all over Europe; in the twentieth century, a large number emigrated to Israel. Several prominent Israeli statesmen were born in Poland, including Israel's founder David Ben-Gurion, former President of Israel Shimon Peres, and Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin.
caption: An ethnic Góral highlander with bagpipes in Lesser Poland
exif: {}