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A summer to remember The Polish effect shines on

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An emerging confidence: Poland’s place in the current hierarchy of nations. page 14

Storm clouds gathering? Prospects for the CEE’s largest economy. page 20

The quiet charm of Sandomierz, one of the country’s lesser known tourist delights. page 64

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international

14The punch and the weightLess dependency on the US, less hostility towards Russia, a newfound friendship with Germany – Poland has recently done well for itself in the realm of foreign affairs, writes Ed Lucas.

16Europe’s newest mutual appreciation club No more fear, no more hatred - Poland and Germany hit the reset button on their relations. The two countries are now closer than ever before, and trade ties are growing, writes Adam Easton

society

44The danger in silence Racism is not rife in Poland, but it exists and it is tolerated. The Euro 2012 football championship and specifically the infamous BBC Panorama programme stirred up sensitivities and forced Polish society to look at itself hard in the mirror, writes Krzysztof Bobiński

46A new kind of mayor Not every election of a village mayor results in a minor media storm and national interest. But Marcin Nikrant, 26, of Leśniewo, is not your typical village mayor. Hanna Kozlowska talks to the first openly gay 'sołtys' in Poland.

culture

48Because this is our country The Polish film industry from the mid-1950’s until the late 1980’s made a rich contribution not only to the lives of those living in the People’s Republic, but also to world cinema. Renowned film critic Tadeusz Sobolewski takes us through the golden years

start up

52The meaning of ice It is not always that easy to get your hands on cold drink on a hot day in Poland, but the entrepreneurs from Quickice will make it easier for you with their state-of-the-art ice-vending machines. In the first episode of our series about start-ups they tell our Publisher, Richard Stephens, about their company and the art of ice-vending.

economy

20How much Grrr does the economic tiger of Central Europe still have?Renowned for being the only economy in the EU to post positive growth throughout the crisis, it seems Poland may be about to fall on harder times. But is the biggest threat the prophets of doom and gloom talking the economy into a downturn that is neither necessary nor inevitable, asks Katya Andrusz

26Financial bloodbath on the highwaysDespite a booming economy and billions of zlotys pouring into Poland’s infrastructure in recent years, contractors are in trouble and bad legislation is the culprit, writes Jan Cienski

28On track for global opportunitiesA town in Poland is building trains that are taking on the world

sport

54The Polish sporting complexWhat a summer... Whether or not you were a sports fan beforehand, if you were in Poland in the last few months, you were forced to become one. We talk to Tomasz Zimoch, Poland’s iconic sports commentator, about the successes and failures of the Polish summer of sport.

history

58The city that almost bled to death Warsaw is not a cosy city, but it has a fascinating history and ardent admirers. Gerhard Gnauck writes about being a German in the capital, exploring the city’s rich past and tragic wounds.

60It happened in... October 1956 was a year of transition for Poland amid a thawing of the Soviet bloc. But it was to prove short-lived.

food

62Surowe Suwałki Twelve Hungry Men. Some of the best chefs in the world came to Suwałki in northern Poland for this year’s edition of Cook it Raw. They cooked and ate regional specialties, adding their own twists, and talked to Richard Stephens.

euro 2012

30The Polish effect shines onThousands of fans from all corners of Europe descended on Warsaw, Wrocław, Gdańsk and Poznań in June to support their teams. Now they’ve all returned home, what are the lasting effects, asks Jonathan Fowler

real estate

36Building on solid ground Too hot? Too cold? As property professionals analyse the wider economy for signs of how it will affect their industry, caution is the watchword, but optimism is still in supply, writes Anna Kapica-Harward

40 Cloudy with a ray of hope Mladen Petrov does a quick straw poll of how things look in the office, retail, warehouse and residential sectors, surveying a cross section of market operators

42Much more to comeGerman real estate developers and investors, both long-term players and recent entrants, still see a lot of potential in the Polish market, writes Andreas Schiller

trips

64Clanking armour on cobbled streets In a world where, sadly, knights in armour exist only in fairytales and history books, the town of Sandomierz evokes them for the young and old(er). Matthew Day writes about its small town charm.

lifestyle

68Pucker up: one kiss or three? Three? One? Two? None? Hand? Hug? The Polish kissing and greeting etiquette can be confusing. Cynthia Naugher Skłodowski ponders and explains the ins and outs of a Polish 'hello.'

70The voice on the box One voice to read them all. Polish television uses a rare translation technique called a 'lektor,' or 'reader.' Foreigners don’t get it, and Poles don’t get why foreigners don’t get it. Hanna Kozlowska writes about the lektor phenomenon.

content

Primetime Warsaw

Warsaw, due to its history and significance at the crossroads between East & West, is one of Europe’s great cities, the undisputed regional economic and political powerhouse.Basking in the recent glow of hosting EURO 2012 and its status as capital of the European Union’s most dynamic economy, there has never been a better time for the city on the Vistula river.

This, the first conference to focus on Warsaw in its entirety, brings you the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

This, the first conference to focus on Warsaw in its entirety, brings you the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

CONFERENCES

Thursday 21ST FEBRUARY 2013Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw

Warsaw is deve-loping fast and provides a host of development op-portunities for all kinds of investors and businesses. Check out Poland Today's con-ference programme for Primetime Warsaw see page 33

Europe’s newest mutual appreciation club. page 16The Polish sporting complex. page 54

Clanking armour on cobbled streets. page 64

Surowe Suwałki. page 62

Real estate. pages 36-44

A new kind of mayor. page 46

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Welcome to  Poland Today magazine. The publication aims to cover a wide range of subjects and themes which, taken together over the months and years ahead, will build a picture of this complex and fascinating country and its people. In this, the introductory issue, we look at topics including Poland’s place in Europe, its ties with Germany, the country’s economic prospects, its customs and habits and much else besides.

The UEFA EURO 2012 football championships may be fast receding in the memory as we look ahead and face what may be a long cold winter - not least metaphorically speaking, considering some of the economic forecasts - but it has changed Poland in profound ways, like the Olympics has the UK. It has not only brought improved roads and in-frastructure and a vastly better image abroad, but most im-portantly, Poland’s self-image has changed. Coming closely on the heels of being lauded far and wide for its economic resilience, the country has shown that it can pull together and organize a large international sporting event with com-petence, flair and good humour. The effect of this success on the nation’s psyche, so long conditioned to self criticism, is the most important result of this memorable summer. We examine the legacy of the competition and take a look at the sporting side of it.

Poland Today is targeted at Polish professionals as well as foreigners living or doing business in Poland. Our aim is to present a different perspective to that of the Polish press and a more in-depth focus than the international cover-age of the country. Future editions will be more business-focused, covering the markets sector by sector. We will always retain a broader view, however, and will continue to write about current affairs, society, culture, arts, history and sports. This magazine is distributed for free. To this end I would like to thank the companies that have backed this new venture by buying advertising space. I am proud to have them in this magazine. I am also grateful to the many firms who offered encouragement and gave good advice, but for various reasons couldn’t come into this first edition. I look forward to welcoming them in the future. The next issue of Poland Today comes out in January 2013 and from then on will be monthly. See you next year!Pu

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Richard Stephens Publisher

Publisher: Financial Director: Creative Director: Associate Editor: Journalist: Editorial Consultant: Www Developer: Marketing Consultant: Contributors: Translators: Photographs: Photographers: Illustrators:

Poland Today Sp. z o. o. Ul. Złota 61 lok. 100, 00-819 Warsaw, Poland tel/fax: (+ 48) 22 464 8269 mobile: (+ 48) 694 922 898, (+ 48) 505 006 606 name.surname@poland-today.pl www.poland-today.pl

Richard Stephens Arkadiusz Jamski Bartosz Stefaniak Hanna Kozłowska Cynthia Sklodowski Valerie Higgins Wiktor Pawłowski Natalia Ligarzewska, Ad Direct Adam Easton Andreas Schiller Anna Kapica- Edward Lucas Gerhard Gnauck Jakub Markiewicz Jonathan Fowler Katya Andrusz Krzysztof Bobiński Matthew Day Mladen Petrov Richard Stephens Tadeusz Sobolewski Antonina Hatcher Clare Rütsch Stuart Dowell Forum Polska Agencja Fotografów Bartek Banaszak Piotr Dziubak Konrad Konstantynowicz Ignacy Ostrowski Jagna Wróblewska Russell Tate

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Our aim is to give a different perspective to that of the Polish press and a more in-depth focus than the international coverage of the country.

Harward

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It’s Complicated: Poland and UkrainePresident Bronisław Komorowski visited Poland’s eastern neighbour, where he met with representatives of the ruling party and the opposition. He emphasized that Ukraine needs to choose a direction for the country’s future development – either towards the East and Russia, or to the West and the European Union and Poland. He also officially opened a Polish war cemetery with President Viktor Yanukovych.

Booby or baby trap?Polish troops in Afghanistan found an infant girl on the roadside near their base in Wagez. Though the ‘package’ could have been a roadside bomb, they picked it up and brought the ba-by back to the base. They named the girl ‘Pola,’ after ‘Poland.’

Poland to sign women’s rights conventionDonald Tusk declared at the Fourth Women’s Congress in Warsaw that Poland would sign the Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against wom-en. The convention’s premises have been questioned by the Polish Catholic Church and right-wing groups.

What Poland has to learn from BelarusAfter President Aleksandr Lukashenko voted in the Belarusian parliamentary elections, he told Polish electoral ob-servers that they should be learning about proper voting procedures from his country. Lukashenko’s ruling party won after a boycott from two of the main opposition parties and reports of electoral fraud.

Polish President in the United NationsBronisław Komorowski joined all the other world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Komorowski spoke to pres-ident Obama, who said he remem-bered about the obligation he has to Polish citizens regarding entry vi-sas to the United States, leaving the Polish president hopeful. Komorowski also spoke to, among others, presi-dent of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai about the Polish military mission in the country.

politics

Smoleńsk plane catastrophe: Exhumations and doubtsThe body of ‘Solidarity’ era opposi-tion leader Anna Walentynowicz was switched with another victim of the 2010 Smoleńsk plane catastrophe, which killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński and 96 other dignitaries. Walentynowicz’s body was exhumed after her family’s doubts about the autopsy conducted in Russia and the identity of the corpse. Other exhu-mations will follow. Much of the po-litical blame is being placed on former Minister of Health, speaker of the Sejm, Ewa Kopacz.

Parliamentary debate over abortion attracts fewOnly 20 members of the Sejm, the lower level of the Parliament attend-ed what was supposed to be a loud and contentious debate over two abortion legislation projects. One mo-tion was put forward by the liberal Palikot’s Movement, while the other by the conservative United Poland (Solidarna Polska). Both legislations were dismissed. Abortion in Poland is permissible only when the mother’s health or life are in danger, the preg-nancy was a result of rape, or the fetus is malformed.

Journalist provocation gets Minister of Justice in troubleA journalist posing as the Prime Minister’s representative phoned Ryszard Milewski, a judge from Gdańsk, to set up a meeting regard-ing the Amber Gold pyramid scheme case. When Justice Milewski promptly

agreed, doubts were raised about the independent character of the Polish judiciary, getting Minister of Justice Jarosław Gowin in serious trouble.

PIS debates the economyLaw and Justice (PIS) invited the big-gest economic minds in the country to debate the party’s economic pro-gramme and the tax system in particu-lar. Some economists accepted, and some declined the invitation. The gen-eral consensus was that the tax sys-tem in Poland needs to be reformed.

current affairs

Hazing scandal causes uproarPhotos of 12 and 13-year-old children kneeling to lick whipped cream off of a priest’s knees surfaced in Lubin, in southwest Poland, scandalizing the entire country and making inter-national news. An investigation has been launched to look into what its participants called an innocent haz-ing ceremony.

Vistula hits rock-bottomThe Vistula river in Warsaw has reached record-low levels due to droughts. At 56 cms deep in parts, you could walk from one shore to the other in mid-September. The river revealed 400 year-old Swedish war booty and a mysterious bridge.

Czech poisoned alcohol spills into PolandCzech authorities banned all hard liq-uor consumption due to 25 deaths of methanol poisoning. At least 3 peo-ple died as a result of similar poison-ing in Poland. Three men were ar-rested for deliberately contaminating a batch of alcohol and channeling it into circulation.

Former President’s daughter gets married in social event of the yearThe daughter of President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Ola, married jazz musi-

cian Jakub Badach in a highly publi-cized ceremony in Warsaw. The list of guests did not include, contro-versially, former prime minister from Kwaśniewski’s party Leszek Miller.

Emigration is on the riseThe Polish Central Statistical Office (GUS) released emigration data for 2011 which shows that emigration is rising. Last year 2,060,000 Poles re-mained abroad, which is 60,000 more than in 2010. Almost 1,700 000 of them were within the European Union

–mostly in UK and Germany.

economy & business

PESA gets expensive German railway dealBydgoszcz-based rail company PESA signed a record zl 1.5 billion deal with Deutsche Bahn. The German railway company purchased 500 train cars from the Polish company. Read more on page 28.

Facebook opens an office in WarsawThe social media giant decided to bet on Poland for the coordination of its business in the entire region of Eastern and Central Europe – a total of 30 countries. The office, with its small, but international personnel will be respon-sible for sales and marketing.

Economic slump, auto industry slowdownPoland’s economy is slowing and the symptoms of this are visible in the auto industry. Overall, it already produced over 20% less cars than in the same period last year, largely due to the problems of Fiat and Opel in Europe.

Bruce Willis comes to a deal with Sobieski vodkaBelvedere SA, the French company that owns the Polish vodka brand paid the actor with market shares as payment for participating in the dis-tiller’s ad campaign. The shares’ price dropped, which entitled the actor to financial compensation. Willis won the legal squabble, and he will receive the promised €20 million.

Polish sports store chain to dominate marketMartes Sport, a company based in Bielsko-Biała, plans to open a hun-dred stores across the country by

2013. It would then have more loca-tions than all of its competitors put to-gether. Currently, the biggest chain is Intersport with 32 stores.

Poles score low on savingA staggering 37% of Poles are inca-pable of saving any sum of money, according to research done by IIBR/Gemius for Meritum Bank, while 16% still save by keeping their money under the mattress.

sport

Warsaw derby leaves no winner, but many damagesEven though Legia’s players dominat-ed the game, they tied with Polonia 1:1. The teams’ ‘fans,’ or otherwise known as hooligans, destroyed bleacher seats, restrooms and refreshment stands, with damages worth at least zl. 200,000.

Lewandowski scores and stays in GermanyThe striker for the Polish national team recently scored in Borussia Dortmund’s game against Ajax Amsterdam, giving his team an impor-tant win in the Champions’ League. Robert Lewandowski is staying in Dortmund, despite being sought out by top European club Chelsea. He is not satisfied with his current EUR 1.5 million salary, however, and negotia-tions are underway.

The ups and downs of the Radwańska sistersJust when everyone thought 21-year-old Urszula Radwańska, younger sis-ter of Poland’s top player Agnieszka, was on a roll, she was destroyed by Angelique Kerber in the third round of the WTA tournament in Tokyo. The older sister was defeated by Nadia Petrova in the final.

culture & society

No more paintball at Hitler’s HQHitler’s Polish headquarters, otherwise known as Wilczy Szaniec, ‘The Wolf’s Lair,’ now a dilapidated and kitschy site where you can play paintball, will un-dergo a general renovation. The Polish authorities imposed the restoration on the private company that runs Hitler’s wartime residence.

Survival of the fittest: Historical cinemas in PolandIconic Polish cinemas are closing their doors and turning off their popcorn machines. A month after the decision to close Łódź’’s legendary Polonia cin-ema, opened in 1911, Warsaw’s Femina may be replaced by the inexpensive grocery chain Biedronka. On the other hand, the capital’s Iluzjon is reopen-ing on October 4th after a big reno-vation.

Coldplay heats up National StadiumJust a little over a year from their first concert in the country, British alt-rock band Coldplay gave a sensational con-cert at the National Stadium in Warsaw, where pop superstar Madonna played just a month earlier. Loudest Polish film premiere in a decade is about hip-hop‘Jesteś Bogiem,’ (‘You’re God’), a film by Leszek Dawid about the Polish hip-hop collective ‘Paktofonika’, is gaining significant critical acclaim and audi-ence appreciation. ‘Jesteś Bogiem’ is not only a moving film about three friends from a working class back-ground who grew up to be legendary hip hop artists, but also an important representation of Poland in the era of transformation.

Iconic novel celebrates its 75th anniversaryWitold Gombrowicz’s famous mod-ernist novel ‘Ferdydurke’ celebrated its 75th birthday in September. The novel, with its abstract and pointed humor, now part of the world’s litera-ture canon, was banned in Poland for decades for its subversive character. The first direct translation into English appeared as late as 2000, by Danuta Borchardt, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. N

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The countdown begins – Jewish museum to open in a year

Warsaw is impatiently awaiting the opening of what will become the big-gest Jewish museum in Europe, and one of the most spectacular build-ings in the city. Construction, which started in 2007, was supposed to be completed in April 2012, on the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but building the complicat-ed structure and arranging the rich, in-teractive exhibition are taking longer than expected. It is already worth go-ing to Muranów district, however, and looking at the breathtaking structure from the outside. It was designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki to resemble the parting of the Red Sea, with a billowing glass and steel facade. The inside is even more spectacular, with its curved concrete walls and cav-ernous spaces. And even though the building is located in the former ghet-to, right by the famous Ghetto Heroes Monument, its founders and design-ers emphasize that it will be devoted to the entire millenium-long history of Jews in Poland. This of course includes, but is not limited to, the Holocaust. An international initiative, the museum made the news in July after receiving a $7 million donation from the Koret and Taube Foundations, as well as $6 mil-lion from prominent Polish business-man Jan Kulczyk.

What you need to do to receive a Polish order of merit

It’s no big deal. You can either be-come a foreign monarch, transform the entire economy of the country, re-ceive a Nobel Prize or … be married for over 50 years. The Polish presi-dent grants dozens of decorations ac-cording to a specific classification and ranking code. You can be awarded a badge, a star, a big fish medal, a cross and, finally, top of the tops, the order. The highest civil and military distinc-tion in Poland is the Order of the White Eagle. To have it bestowed you simply need to be the pope, like John Paul II, a Holocaust hero, like Irena Sendler, or one of the most important eco-nomic minds in the country, like Leszek Balcerowicz. If you aren’t Polish, it suf-fices to be an Emperor, for example Akihito of Japan, or a renowned states-man such as Ronald Reagan. If you distinguish yourself in war, like World War Two general Douglas MacArthur, you will get the oldest continuously-granted military order in the world – the Virtuti Militari Cross, established in 1792. For a slightly lower distinction, but no less a feat, you can receive the Medal for Long Marital Life if you are a couple married for at least 50 years. Good luck!

Getting social online in Poland: international or domestic?

Poland has over 8.6 million Facebook users, ranking the country 25th in the world. A few years ago it seemed that the homegrown Nasza Klasa (nk.pl), where you could connect to your old classmates, would dominate the online social sphere. Today, how-ever, Facebook has 40% of social me-dia participation, while Nasza Klasa, generally used by a slightly older de-mographic, has 37%. In a recent study by Megapanel PBI/Gemius, Facebook came in third for monthly reach of on-line portals, after Google and Onet.pl, with Nasza Klasa trailing behind at 9th. Most brands on the Polish market are attempting to jump on the Facebook bandwagon. The most popular brand profiles are ‘Serce i Rozum’ (Heart and Mind), the cartoon ad campaign for TP.SA, followed by the four cellphone service providers and online shopping giant Allegro. Another potential do-mestic-international rivalry may ensue after a Polish version of professional networking site LinkedIn was launched in April, threatening goldenline.pl with its two million users. Poland also has a rising Twitter community, with 2.5 mil-lion people tweeting away to their adoring followings.

in Focus

by Hanna Kozłowska

German and Austrian real estate investors, both long-term players and re-cent entrants, still see a lot of potential in the Polish market, writes Andreas Schiller see page 42

12 Polish musicians making it big across genres and continents

Poland is finally on the world’s mu-sical radar for more than just be-ing Frederic Chopin’s homeland (that's right, he's not French!). Paula & Karol, a Canadian-Polish duo, are making audiences fall in love with their ‘urban folk’ music everywhere they go, from Kiev to the legendary South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. 25 year-old Radzimir Dębski (pictured), known to the world as Jimek, has gathered a slightly differ-ent audience... such as music royalty Beyonce, who called the DJ at 3 a.m. one morning to congratulate him on winning the contest for remixing her song ‘End of Time.’ In another stel-lar collaboration, Polish singer Iza Lach is recording a song with hip-hop legend Snoop Dogg. If you’re not into club hopping, you can dress up smart and enjoy the angelic voices of Aleksandra Kurzak and Mariusz Kwiecień. revered by, among oth-ers, the Metropolitan Opera audi-ence in New York City. Some Polish artists have gained popularity very far from home - for instance Bayer Full, a band representing the widely-disdained-in-Poland genre of ‘disco polo’, is very popular in China, while songstress Anna Maria Jopek has a large fanbase in Japan. Your friends abroad – if they’re lucky, and sophisti-cated to boot - might also have heard of Kapela ze wsi Warszawa, the KDMS, Basia or Julia Marcell.

The successes and failures of city bikes in Poland

City bikes have taken over Poland. Kraków, Opole, Rzeszów, Poznań, Wrocław and Warsaw all have hun-dreds of bikes at the disposal of any-one who wants to lead a healthier life-style, help the environment, enjoy the weather or simply get somewhere fast-er than by car, bus or tram. The eco-friendly vehicles, available to rent for a small fee, have become enormously popular. In Warsaw, during its maiden week, the Veturilo system - designed by German company Nextbike - regis-tered 21,000 rentals. With the capital’s main arteries under renovation, it will be increasingly hard to get one’s mitts on one of these bikes, at least until the cold, slippery, two-wheel unfriendly winter comes along. The bikes’ intro-duction to Polish streets (and pave-ments) hasn’t been entirely smooth, however. Several have broken or have missing parts, and the phone lines are often unreachable. In Kraków, due to a disagreement between the current and previous companies managing the system, all of the bikes were unavail-able for weeks, locked in their stands. But at least we can boast that cities like Rzeszów and Opole are ahead of slow coaches like New York, which will introduce its bike programme as late as March 2013.

A beer by any other name…

Your average Pole, who rarely chooses a Heineken or Carlsberg over a local product, drank almost 90 (!) litres of beer last year, which is more than an average American, Belgian or Dutch person. In the past few years this huge market, previously dominated by the popular Tyskie, Żywiec and Lech brands, has had to reluctantly wel-come new players – not only the inex-pensive beer produced for large chain supermarkets such as Biedronka or Lidl – but also the increasingly popular unpasteurized beer from smaller, lo-cal breweries. This branch of the beer industry is growing at an astonishing pace. Unpasteurized beer is more ex-pensive, generally seen as higher-end, and popular among young Polish ur-banites and their upper middle class parents as well as beer conoisseurs. The pasteurization process consists of heating up the beer to approx. 60 de-grees Celsius to eliminate all the mi-croorganisms born during the beer’s maturation. And while this increases the beverage’s shelf-life, it detracts from its flavour and nutritional value. Unpasteurized beer has a shorter life-span, ranging from just a few days to a maximum of three weeks. If an expi-ration date is longer than three weeks, the beer will have been ‘microfiltered’. This doesn’t mean it was pasteurized, but the microfiltration process strips the beer of the nutrients that unpas-teurized beer retains.

in Focus

by Hanna Kozłowska

Macaulay Culkin sounding the same as Arnold Schwarzeneg-ger? Where else but in Poland... and a couple of other countries. Poles are used to it, foreigners think it's funny. What's with the voice on the box? see page 70

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It is a cliché of British diplomacy that the country ‘punches above its weight’. The implication is that Britain still matters more than hard numbers about its military and economic strength would suggest. By contrast, Poland punches be-low its weight. In population, economic heft, land area and location, Poland is hugely important to Europe. Yet for 70 years it has been the object of other people’s decision-making, rather than the determinant of its own destiny. Now that is changing. One reason is a geopolitical equilib-rium. Poland is not dominated by its neighbours and does not feel scared of them. That is a huge change. Even after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, Poland’s political class was riven with fears of Russia (largely justified) and fears of Germany (almost all mistaken). This peaked under former Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński. It led to an ab-surdly negative treatment of Germany under the friendly leadership of Angela Merkel, and a commendable but cost-ly solidarity with the victims of Russia’s neo-imperialist poli-cies such as Georgia.

Reset with RussiaUnder Donald Tusk’s government, the neuroses are ban-ished. Relations with Germany are close and friendly, as never before in Polish history. Radek Sikorski’s speech in Berlin last year, in which he explicitly endorsed Berlin’s lead-ership in Europe, is still reverberating in the German politi-cal class. It is still coming to terms with the idea that Poland is a dependable partner - more so than France, the tradi-tional axis of German policy in Europe. The Polish ‘reset’ with Russia also looks well judged. Poland lured Vladimir Putin to Gdańsk in 2009 and gained an apology of sorts for the Soviet attack 70 years earlier. The Soviet version

vival in the failing years of communism. The first priority for the government was to prevent collapse, with ‘shock therapy’, and to renegotiate the country’s crippling for-eign debts. Politics was bewilderingly unstable and capri-cious. As an object of study for outsiders, that was fasci-nating. As a place to invest or trade, it was less tempting. Foreigners found other ex-communist countries more at-tractive. The thinking was: If you want size, go to Russia. If you want sophistication, then go to Hungary. How that has changed. Partly by good luck and partly by good pol-icy-making, Poland’s economy is now one of the most at-tractive in Europe. Productivity is rising but still has plenty of attractive gains in store before it reaches European lev-els. Robust domestic demand means that Poland (unlike smaller, export-dependent counterparts) is less riskily ex-posed to the woes of the Euro zone. Polish consumers have plenty of money and like spending it. Another big shift is that politics is so boring. That is good. Mr Tusk may not be to everyone’s taste. His government sometimes on-ly nibbles at the country’s problems and sometimes bites off more than it can chew. Critics rightly decry sleaze and

cronyism. Others feel that it is too close to Russia, and believe that scandals are habitually hushed up. But the public seems broadly content with his government calm and solid style. In the context of Europe, mid-2012, that is no mean achievement.

Smaller countries, bigger problemsThe picture is not wholly rosy. Poland’s relationship with countries to the east and south is tricky. Ties with Lithuania, a small but geographically crucial neighbour, are blighted by a row that mixes a historic mutual incomprehension with a personality clash (and perhaps a dose of Russian mischief-making too). The Visegrad countries have long been mistrustful, seeing Poland as too big and too close to Germany to be a real partner (though this is now changing, belatedly, amid a new Polish-Czech love-in). The Eastern Partnership has in most respects been an outright disaster for Poland. Its overtures to Belarus have been humiliatingly rebuffed. Ukraine is spiralling downwards, despite intense Polish efforts to jolt the regime onto a different course. Georgia no longer sees Poland as an ally (and Poland sees Georgia as a liability). It would be a mistake for Poland to settle for a subordinate role in the new German-led con-figuration of countries that have solid public finances and can dictate terms to the rest of the continent. That is risky. Germany has its own interests. Poland is not France – a nu-clear-armed member of the UN Security Council, with huge global reach and diplomatic clout. France in its heyday could bargain with Germany as an equal. Poland cannot, and will never be able to do that. In short: Poland has done brilliantly in managing its relations with big countries. It still has much to do in its ties with small ones. by Edward Lucas

of history, which obscures the blame for that and other crimes, had been making a comeback in the official media. Now it has all but vanished. Andrzej Wajda’s film ‘Katyń’ has been shown twice on Russian television. Trade is booming. Russia dislikes American missile-defence plans in Europe. But its relationship with Poland (which will host the sea-borne rockets) is far warmer than with, say, Lithuania, which is only a bystander in the scheme. In short: Poland is not friendly with Russia. But it has never felt less threatened.

A distracted USAWith its relations solid to the east and west, Poland is no longer so dependent on America. The past 20 years were marked by a needy and emotional Atlanticism that became increasingly out of kilter with America’s real capabilities and interests. Having gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan for America, and having agreed to detain (and quite likely torture) terrorist suspects, Poland expected a generous response. It did not receive it. America was not interested in equipping and training the Polish military, let alone mov-ing military bases from ‘old Europe’ to Poland. It would not even lift the humiliating visa regime that Poland, alone of all Schengen countries, still endures. This does not reflect malevolence. It is just that America is overstretched and distracted. Polish officials who had once been the most ardent Atlanticists learned their lesson.

Boring politics = good politicsBehind this balanced and solid diplomacy is economic strength. Poland entered the post-1989 world in a sham-bolic state. The infrastructure was a joke. Financial and human resources were denuded by the struggle for sur-

The PUNCh ANd The weighT

Edward Lucas is International Editor of The Economist. He has covered Central and Eastern Europe for more than 20 years, witness-ing the final years of the last Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet empire. He holds a BSc from the London School of Economics and studied Polish at the Jagiellonian University.  

Where Central Europe’s leading power stands in the international pecking order

inteRnational inteRnational

‘Poland is not dominated by its neighbours and does not feel scared of them. That is a huge change’

illustration: Jagna wróblewska

of the country. Given the shared his-tory of the two countries, especially in the 20th century, the change in atti-tudes is remarkable, however. Beyond Poland the extent of Polish suffering at the hands of the Germans during the Second World War is underappreci-ated. About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. The destruction of Warsaw was just the beginning of one the bloodiest occupations in the war, in which Germans killed close to five million Polish citizens, three million of them Polish Jews. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atom-ic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Since the end of communism in 1989 Poland has oriented to the West, join-

ing first NATO and then, in 2004, the European Union. Crucially, Germany supported Poland’s return to Europe. The process of reconciliation between Poland and Germany predates EU ac-cession of course. A pastoral letter writ-ten by Polish bishops to their German counterparts in November 1965, in which they declared: ‘We forgive and ask for forgiveness’, was a milestone. But Berlin has only become Warsaw’s key ally since the centre-right Civic Platform (PO) party took office in 2007. The shift in policy followed two years of uneasy sensitivity characterized by the late President Lech Kaczyński cancel-ling a summit meeting between Polish, German and French leaders, after the German newspaper, Tageszeitung, lik-ened he and his identical twin broth-er, Jarosław, then the Prime Minister, to potatoes. The Kaczyńskis believed Poland’s interests were best served by the transatlantic relationship. In con-trast Prime Minister Donald Tusk has taken a decidedly cooler approach to Washington, emphasizing the coun-try’s ties with the EU, and Germany in particular.

The indispensable onePoland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, chose Berlin to give a key-note speech on the Eurozone crisis last November. Recalling Poland’s transi-tion from communist dictatorship to democracy, Sikorski, said, We appre-ciate the strong and generous support

– the solidarity – which Germany has extended to us over the last two dec-ades. Ich danke Ihnen als Politiker und als Pole. He went on to urge Berlin to take decisive action to save the Euro.

I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity. You have become Europe’s indispensa-ble nation. Sikorski believes Poland has already come to terms with its domi-nant neighbour. I would say that the job of reconciliation with Germany is pretty much done. We are now treaty allies in NATO and we are members of the same European family where we have daily business on all aspects. It’s a very intimate relationship. Germany is by far our biggest trading partner. By getting involved in Europe Poland has found, particularly under this German government, a friendly partner, he said during a debate with the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in Warsaw on June 27.

Marcin Zaborowski agrees with-Sikorski, saying relations between the two countries have never been better. He says Sikorski’s personal relationship with his German coun-terpart, Guido Westerwelle, is par-ticularly close and has produced joint initiatives on Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. Zaborowski points out that diplomacy is now not restricted to the level of leaders but occurs regularly on the level of deputy ministers and senior civil servants. This is an admin-istration that is more oriented towards Europe. It doesn’t run foreign policy on the basis of historically driven per-ceptions. It’s a pragmatically minded foreign policy. It’s partly about pur-suing Polish interests but it’s also be-cause we have similar interests such as Eastern Europe because Germany actually cares about it and many EU

In not so distant times an army of twenty thousand young German men arriving in the Polish capital Warsaw would have been cause for alarm among Poles. Their Polish hosts instead welcomed the flag-waving German fans that travelled to Warsaw to watch their team play Italy in the semi-final of the European football championships at the end of June. Inside the National Stadium that evening the German fans reciprocated by being the first to sing the anthem of the Polish national side, ‘Polska, Biało-Czerwoni’.

Large numbers of German sup-porters in Warsaw is no longer an is-sue. Twenty years ago you might not have felt as safe walking around with a German flag, said Marcin Zaborowski, the director of the Polish institute of international Affairs, said. Opinion polls

member states are not interested in it at all. We have different views con-cerning Ukraine but at least they care, he said. The relationship is lop-sided given the sizes of the two countries and because Poland is not a member of the Eurozone, the primary issue exercising German politician’s minds. We are peripheral in that sense but we are top of the German’s list when it comes to eastern and central Europe. Certainly Germany pays more atten-tion to Poland’s opinion than it used to in the context of Russia’s relation-ship with the EU. That wasn’t the case before. I don’t think we’re essential to Germany’s eastern policy but we’re an important part of it, Zaborowski said.

Influencing Eastern policyThere are differences of course, nota-bly over Poland’s other main historical foe, Russia. Poland is on the EU’s bor-der and Warsaw is concerned about the often less stable and democratic countries between itself and Russia. Berlin is surrounded by stable, dem-ocratic states, and focuses on the 27-member bloc’s relationship with Russia. The starkest difference can be seen in energy policy. Germany took part in the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline that brings Russian gas along the Baltic seabed. Warsaw wor-ried the new pipeline meant gazprom could turn off the taps to Poland and use energy as a tool. Sikorski com-plained that Berlin had not consulted Warsaw’s opinion before agreeing to the project and likened it to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that re-sulted in Poland being carved up be-tween Nazi Germany and the USSR.

suggest that Poles’ feelings towards Germans are warming up. Twenty years ago twice as many respondents disliked Germans as liked them, ac-cording to the polling agency CBOS. In February of this year the trend had reversed with 43% of respondents say-ing they liked Germans whilst 24% said they disliked them.

A difficult backgroundThis is not to suggest that Poles and Germans have discovered warm fra-ternal feelings towards each other. According to the CBOS survey Poles like Czechs, Slovaks, Italians and even Brits more than Germans. On the other side of the border millions of Germans barely give Poland a passing thought and the national stereotype of Poles as car thieves still resonates in parts

Adam Easton has been the BBC corre-spondent in Warsaw since 2003. Previously he was the BBC cor-respondent in Vene-zuela covering events such as the attempted coup against Presi-dent Hugo Chavez in 2002. Prior to that Adam was the Manila correspondent for The Guardian news-paper. Adam has been a journalist for almost two decades working for newspapers, radio and television in the UK, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Kraków, June 4, 2009.

eUrOPe’S NeweST mUTUAl APPreCiATiON ClUBWarsaw and Berlin have re-orientated their relationship

Angela Merkel and Donald Tusk address a news conference in Berlin December 11, 2007

Donald Tusk meets Angela Merkel in Kraków, marking the 20th anniversary of the first free parliamentary election that signalled the end of communist rule. June 4, 2009.

Angela Merkel and Donald Tusk meet in Gdansk June 16, 2008.

Angela Merkel meets with Donald Tusk at the Prime Minister's Chan-cellery in Warsaw December 9, 2008. Merkel is visiting Warsaw for the next round of Polish-German government consultations

German Chancellor Angela Merkel chats with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk during a welcome ceremony before talks in Berlin, December 6, 2010.

One of the first meetings: Angela Merkel, head of CDU party and candidate for Chancel-lor post welcomed in Warsaw by Donald Tusk, August 16, 2005.

Chancellor Merkel saw Nord Stream as a means of diversifying its energy im-ports. Poland wishes to diversify too, but Soviet-era infrastructure means it has far fewer options. Until recently, it had no alternative than to source two thirds of its annual gas consumption through a single pipeline from Russia under a swingeing take-or-pay con-tract indexed to high crude oil prices.

Tusk also wants to build the first nu-clear power plants in Poland, just as Germany is shutting down its own in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Germany also opposes shale gas ex-ploration that Poland has been spear-heading in Europe as a way to lessen its dependence on Russian imports. It’s partly on environmental grounds but avoiding upsetting Gazprom may be a factor. It’s somewhat surprising, then, that Germany’s trade with Poland is

bigger than it is with Russia. Last year it was worth EUR 69 billion, up by one quarter since 2007. For two decades, Germany has been by far Poland’s most important trading partner with German exports to Poland growing nine-fold since 1990. Germany mainly exports machinery and electrical goods, indus-trial plant, automobiles, chemicals and plastic products.

According to the German Foreign Office, Germany is the largest for-eign investor in Poland in terms of the number of investors and the amount invested. Among the major German investments in Poland are the chemi-cal and pharmaceutical industries, me-chanical engineering and car manu-facture. Volkswagen produces its small vans, the Caddy and Transporter, in the company’s second largest factory in Poznań. Opel manufactures its Astra

and Zafira cars in Gliwice, and is one of the largest foreign investors in Upper Silesia, employing 3,000 staff. The au-tomotive sector and business process outsourcing, especially in IT, are the two main growth trends in the last six years, Katarzyna Soszka-Ogrodnik, spokeswoman for the Polish-german Chamber of Commerce in warsaw says. According to one of their reports in March, Poland was rated the most at-tractive country for investment in cen-tral and Eastern Europe as a result of it being in the EU and its well-qualified and motivated workforce. Poland’s success in weathering the economic crisis has undoubtedly helped and has perhaps helped changed German per-ceptions about its neighbour. But the greatest success is that their shared tragic history no longer dominates their relationship. by Adam Easton

‘The Kaczyńskis believed Poland’s interests were best served by the transatlantic relationship. in contrast Prime minister donald Tusk has emphasized the country’s ties with the eU, and germany in particular’

germanyPopulation approx. 82 mln Public debt (2011): 81,2 % GDPPublic debt in EUR (2011): 2100 bln Budget deficit (2011): -1%GDP growth (2011): 3%unemployment (2010): 7,1 Germany is the 16th most populous country in the world

source: Eurostat, World Bank

polandPopulation: approx. 38 mln Public debt (2011): 56,3% GDPPublic debt in EUR (2011): 193 blnBudget deficit (2011): -5,1%GDP growth (2011): 4,35%unemployment (2010): 9,6%

Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world

source: Eurostat, World Bank

Angela Merkel and Donald Tusk brief the media on details of a fatal accident on the A10 motorway, at the Polish embassy in Berlin, September 26, 2010.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks with Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk as they pose during a photocall at town hall in Hamburg February 27, 2009, before the tradi-tional annual 'Matthiae dinner'.

Angela Merkel laughs next to Donald Tusk during an European Union extraordinary lead-ers summit on Libya and North Africa, in Brussels March 11, 2011.

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20 21

Ceteris paribus is a term much beloved of economists meaning ‘all things being equal’. It is also helpful to all those without a crystal ball who wish to describe the outlook for the Polish economy, which has surprised even its own architects with its resil-ience over the last, troubled five years.

Poland’s economic success story began with a coincidence. The short-lived government of the Kaczyński twins’ law & Justice (PiS) party, which is not known for its economic pres-cience, approved a reduction in em-ployers’ contributions and in personal income tax that came into effect in 2008 and 2009 respectively. The re-sult? As the global economy slumped in the aftermath of lehman Brothers’ collapse, Polish gross domestic prod-uct expanded 1.6% in 2009, the only member of the European Union not to go into recession. The spur to domestic consumption brought about by the tax cut helped increase Poland’s independ-ence, already greater than elsewhere in Central Europe, from the travails of its western neighbours. Poland’s pop-ulation of 38 million makes the coun-try by far the biggest market of the 10 post-communist countries that have joined the EU over the last eight years

ing currency, and for a while that was all we needed, said Maciej Krzak, econom-ics expert at the Centre for Social and economic research in Warsaw.

The prime minister, Donald Tusk, called a special press conference on the day the statistics office released the 2009 GDP figures and beamed as proudly as his recent British coun-terparts announcing the birth of their babies outside No. 10 as he gestured to a map behind him of the EU, with each member state coloured in red for recession, and only Poland shaded green for growth.

However, Mr Tusk was not looking as cheerful when he called a press con-ference at the beginning of September, less than a week after the national sta-tistics office announced that growth had slowed to an annual 2.4% in the second quarter of 2012 from 4.2% in the same period last year. Politicians shouldn’t give up their dreams for any-thing unless it’s for figures, he said. The figures have to add up.

Forecasts cutNot that much has been adding up lately in the Polish economy. Companies aren’t hiring, wages are barely growing, and unemployment

is growing. The unsurprising result? Consumers didn’t spend as much as was hoped for during the European Championship, and they still aren’t – which is the real worry. Bank of America merrill lynch has savagely cut its Polish growth forecast for 2013, and it isn’t the only bank to do so. According to Raffaella Tenconi, an economist at BoA, one of the Polish economy’s biggest problems is that it has seemingly lost the confidence of the Polish people.

I think the downturn is very much becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of low confidence, she says. Of course, given the depth of the eurozone crisis, if you’re sitting in Warsaw and look-ing at what’s happening in Frankfurt, it’s entirely reasonable to be cau-tious. Piotr Kowalski, who heads Fitch ratings Polish office, believes much of the drop in confidence is due to the tight labour market. People aren’t buying because they’re afraid for their jobs, he says. Everyone is expecting unemployment to rise. The jobless rate has remained above 12% all this year. While the government said re-cently that unemployment would av-erage 12.4% in 2013, the fact that so few companies are hiring and many

manufacturers have said they intend to cut jobs makes this forecast, for many, less than plausible.

Spanish scenarioThe jobless rate is higher than it was towards the end of 2011, even though we are at the height of the year for seasonal work in the construction and agriculture sectors. And unemploy-ment among young people is above the already unenviably high EU aver-age of about 23%. world Bank figures show that Poland also has the highest number of temporary appointments in Central Europe, making up about a fifth of all new jobs. The negative situ-ation on the labour market has been

exacerbated by low wage growth, which together with relatively high in-flation has meant that workers’ salaries were effectively cut for several months of the last year. This has slowed con-sumer spending, a vital component of Poland’s economic growth since the global crisis broke. Price increases have also been a major cause of the re-cent spate of bankruptcies in the con-struction sector such as PBg SA, ironic as the company co-built Warsaw’s brand new sports stadium for this year’s UeFA cup. Many of these firms hedged for price increases in mate-rials from steel to cement far below their final cost, leaving them out of pocket even when investors had fin-ished paying their bills.

My biggest fear is the Spanish scenario, says Przemysław Wipler, a member of parliament for law & Justice who sits on the parliamentary public finance com-mittee, referring to the country’s 50% youth unemployment rate. That would depress morale even more among young people who are already having a hard time. After a drop in 2006-08, last year almost 7% of the population lived in extreme poverty, defined as having an income no higher than 495 zloty a month for a one-person household.

(Romania comes second with about 21 million, but its economy is not much above a third the size of Poland’s), and thus far less reliant on external demand.

Even exports held up far better than many expected after appetite for Polish goods in Western Europe faded, as the zloty lost almost a quarter of its value against the euro, making Poland much more competitive than for exam-ple the Baltic economies, whose cur-rencies were at the time all pegged to the euro in the exchange-rate mecha-nism (Estonia has since adopted the euro, but that’s another story).

Football feverTo top it all, in 2007 Poland won a bid to co-host this year’s European foot-ball championship, which not only boosted national morale, but was also a powerful motivation to overcome years of inertia and construct more than 500 kilometres of motorway, not to mention stadia. Hotels were built and extra turf laid for national teams quartered in Poland to practise on ahead of their games, while brewers rubbed their hands in expectation of beer-thirsty tourists from abroad. We had football fever, consumers with money in their pockets, and a free-float-

hOw mUCh Grrr dOeS The eCONOmiC Tiger OF CeNTrAl eUrOPe STill hAVe?

Katya Andrusz is a freelance journal-ist who has covered German and Central European affairs for more than a decade, working for Reuters, Bloomberg News, The Economist and The Guardian. She specialises in political and economic issues, reporting on Poland’s entry into the Euro-pean Union and the region’s increasing weight in the EU from Warsaw and Brussels.

20 years of economic growth. If the IMF's April forecasts are correct, Poland is still streets ahead of the eurozone's troubled south

Perspectives for the Polish economy

economy economy

1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 20082004 20102006 20121991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 20092005 20112007 2013

‘The downturn is very much becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of low confidence’

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22economy

law & Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński is proposing a number of re-forms the party says will boost growth and eliminate social inequality, but has Mr Tusk’s supporters holding their ears and running for cover. Measures would include a tax on banks and hypermar-kets, longer maternity leave, repealing recent legislation to raise the retire-ment age, cutting disability contri-butions for employers, and spending more on getting the unemployed back into paid work.

The labour minister, a member of the more socially minded junior coalition party, only recently won a battle with his colleague from the finance ministry over the release of a fraction of addi-tional funds to assist the jobless that are currently frozen, helping to shave billions of zloty off the budget deficit. Dariusz Rosati, a member of the prime minister’s Civic Platform (PO) party and head of the public finance committee, speaks of ordinary Poles ‘feeling the pinch’ as unemployment has risen and after social benefit levels were frozen. This, though, is not enough for his com-mittee colleague Mr Wipler, who fears the longer-term effects on society. Of course GDP and other macroeconomic data are important, but these are our

people, he says. We could see them being lost to society if they’re ignored as they have been.

Plenty of homeworkSeeking solutions to these problems is not easy. Of course, if it had not been for the euro-area crisis, higher growth in Western Europe would have kept Polish exports growing at a decent rate, and market jumpiness would not have sent the zloty into a downward spiral. Still, blaming the situation in the euro zone for all of Poland’s cur-rent economic woes is not an op-tion, according to world Bank econo-mist Emilia Skrok. I wouldn’t focus too much on events in the euro zone – the Poles have plenty to do at home, she says. There is a horrendous infrastruc-ture gap in Poland. There are roads that need building, and the railway connections are appalling.

In addition, establishing and run-ning firms has to be made easier, says Peter Turo, an entrepreneur who left Poland some 30 years ago and only recently returned to set up a number of businesses. The bureaucracy here really reminds me of the communist era – it’s the same mentality, the same procedures, he says. And the stamp-

gathering is a throwback to even earlier, to Tsarist times. There’s nothing in the Polish constitution that says you need a red stamp to seal a deal, but people carry on doing it because that’s how things have always been done.

Deficit targetAlthough Poland’s position has appar-ently greatly improved this year, the country is currently 62nd in the world Bank’s ease of doing business ranking. This puts it behind Hungary, the basket case of Central Europe, not to men-tion Armenia and Kazakhstan. Hardly a selling point for the EU’s self-styled economic oasis.

Then there is the thorny issue of the budget deficit. While the government cut the shortfall from 7.8% of output in 2010 to 5.1% of GDP last year, the number of economists who believed Mr Tusk would meet his aim of reduc-ing it to the targeted 2.9% of GDP this year was always few and far between. And now the prime minister himself has announced that the budget gap will be 3.5% of GDP this year, above the EU’s ceiling.

Most important now is that the gov-ernment reacts to the new situation to make sure it doesn’t threaten its

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has a lot on his mind, some negative, some positive. How will he reconcile these in the months ahead?

illustration: ignacy ostrowski

24economy

well established credibility at home or abroad, that it says it will take steps to keep the economy on an even keel, says Ms Skrok. The prime minister has his work cut out ahead of a major speech to parliament in a few weeks, she adds. My biggest fear for the econ-omy at the moment would be irrespon-sible or controversial political decisions that threaten our credibility with the markets. However, excessive passiv-ity would also be a mistake, since that would look as though the government had either not noticed or was ignoring the new situation.

Getting better all the timeNevertheless, investors in Poland are not intending to leave as the condi-tions are far better than they could ex-pect elsewhere, believes Ms Tenconi.

I’m not at all afraid of an investor run on Poland, she says. Polish fundamen-tals are robust, the economy has mini-mal structural challenges and the debt burden is well manageable. The prob-lems in the eurozone periphery have shifted capital to other destinations with limited default risk, Poland is one of them. For the moment, investor confidence is ringing loud and clear. If only temporarily, Poland’s credit-default swaps sank to levels below those of France this year for the first time. And as parliamentary commit-tee head Mr Rosati says: I’ve been sur-prised by how well markets have react-ed to our reforms so far. Look at how our bond yields have fallen! Indeed, the yield on Poland’s five-year bond fell to a record low in September, making it cheaper for the government to borrow.

Balance of trade in EUR billions. Imports exceed exports. source: National Statistics Office (GUS)

Structure of trade in percentages of the total export and import. source: National Statistics Office (GUS)

2000 2002 20082004 20102006 20122001 2003 20092005 20112007 2013

polish importsDeveloped countries: 64%Developing countries: 19,4%European Union: 57,2% Eurozone: 44,8%Central & Eastern Europe: 16,6%Germany: 21,2%Russia: 14,6%China: 8,8% Italy: 5,2%

polish exportsDeveloped countries: 82,9%Developing countries: 8%European Union: 76,8% Eurozone: 52,9%Central & Eastern Europe: 9,1%Germany: 25,5%UK: 6,6%Czech Republic: 6,3% France: 6,2%

‘Polish fundamentals are robust, the economy has minimal structural challenges

and the debt burden is well manageable’

Exports

Imports

Poland’s position as Central Europe’s largest market, combined with the government’s efforts to re-structure the economy and keep a tight hold on public finances, mean that investor confidence in Poland is at a higher level than the former Soviet satellite could have dreamt of two decades ago. And this is likely to remain the case – even if the eco-nomic indicators don’t look too rosy at the moment.

We envisaged a slowdown and if it turns out to be a bit deeper than we thought, that doesn’t bother us too much, says Fitch’s Mr Kowalski. If the Polish government really imple-ments the reforms it says it will and they bear fruit, then I think Poland could be a star. All things being equal. by Katya Andrusz

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In 2009 and 2010, when Poland finally embarked on a massive round of public tenders to speed up its road mod-ernisation programme, the government’s main concern was that the process not be tainted with the allegations of corruption that linger over many other big projects in the region, and that the process follow EU norms, crucial to unlocking billions in structural funds from Brussels. As the government’s road-building agency undertook more than 140 tenders worth about 70bn zlotys (EUR 16.7bn), those two goals were largely met – the process was seen as relatively clean and the EU did not have much problem in refunding a large proportion of the building projects (10bn zlotys have flowed back to Poland just this year). But the result of the agency’s dogmatic adherence to stand-ards has turned into a disaster for the Polish construction industry. Dozens of contractors have gone bust this year alone, endangering the completion of several highway projects, undercutting future investment programmes in upgrading power and natural gas infrastructure, dragging down the stock market, even throwing a scare into the country’s banks, which lent enormous sums to contrac-

them to be careful, to keep in mind that they would all be buying cement, steel and asphalt at the same time – some-thing that could mean price rises. Everyone understood, said Witecki. While construction companies may have un-derstood, they also took a risky bet, hoping that prices would remain under control and that, if a problem did turn up, that the Directorate would be flexible and kick in a bit extra to help struggling companies. We construction com-panies had to start for these contracts. They had the peo-ple and the equipment which would otherwise be standing idle, said Maciej Radziwiłł, the former CEO of Trakcja-Tiltra, a railway construction company whose highway subsidi-ary, Poldim, also recently declared bankruptcy. The rosy assumptions of construction companies turned into a sea of red ink as raw material prices skyrocketed. Asphalt prices rose by 14% in 2010 and a further 25% in 2011; steel rose by 73% and then by 10%, while fuel jumped by 13% in 2010 and 16% in 2011.

The contracts signed by the Directorate gave the agency no pricing flexibility, and the companies were left to absorb the higher costs on their own. Of course managers made mistakes, but the state did not protect us at all from risk, said Radziwiłł. Added to that, the Directorate stuck with draconian fines for any delays – some contracts had provisions calling for penalties of 0.7% of the full bid amount for every day of delay. Witecki argues that his agency’s hands were tied. I can’t change anything in the contract, he said. That runs into refunding risks from the EU and I also run the risk of facing challenges from contractors who did not win the tender. The Directorate is already facing 3bn zlotys in claims from disgruntled companies that did not win tenders, and any rule-bending in favour of contract win-ners would see that amount rise significantly. Witecki pulled out a piece of paper and sketched a highway overpass that would allow animals to cross safely over the road. The contract calls for this to be built in concrete but we have contractors claiming it’s just as good if it’s built out of cor-rugated steel – which is a lot cheaper. I just can’t allow that, he said. He added: We are the biggest beneficiaries of EU funds. The EU is giving us money and we are holding open and transparent tenders. We have to follow the law.

Chinese troublesThe signs of trouble came in 2010 when Covec, a Chinese construction company, bid for two tenders to build sec-tions of Poland’s east-west A2 highway connecting Warsaw to the German border. The bid came in 40% below the Directorate’s own estimate, so low that outraged competi-tors complained to Brussels that Covec was price dumping and that there was no way that the company could build the road for the price it suggested. The Directorate was also suspicious, asking the Chinese to justify their low price, which they did by saying that if they had to, they would import labour and machinery from China and that they could rely on their own funds, reducing their borrowing costs. Privately, the Poles expected Covec to be backed by the Chinese government, which was keen to grab a share of European infrastructure projects and the Polish project would have been a good advertisement. The Directorate also asked the European Commission to define excessively low bids, but had no legal way of rejecting the Chinese.

We simply couldn’t knock off the cheapest bid, said Witecki. In the end the suspicions about Covec’s ability to get the job done proved justified, and the company was not res-cued by Beijing. After failing to pay subcontractors it was kicked off the project and replaced by dSS, a former grav-el supplier turned construction company which was also bankrupted by the project.

The bloodbath in the construction sector has turned into a political problem for the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, with the result that the current approach to public tenders will likely change. The contractors’ cause has been adopted by Waldemar Pawlak, the economy minister and leader of the Polish People’s Party (PSl), junior member of the ruling coalition, who sees the potential of differenti-ating himself from his larger partner in Tusk’s Civic Platform party and of shoring up his party’s support among small and medium sized businesses. Pawlak wants the govern-ment to buy bonds issued by distressed construction com-panies as a way of keeping them in business, an idea being fiercely resisted by Jacek Rostowski, the finance minister.

Banks turning their backsMinister of Treasury Mikołaj Budzanowski is suggesting that the government either kick in 385m zlotys to help rescue PBg – a company that also built three of the four football stadiums used in the champion-ships and is involved in building a new LNG terminal on the Baltic coast as well as other energy infrastructure project. Budzanowski’s other idea is for the treas-ury to buy up some of PBG’s subsidiaries to give the company a needed cash injec-tion. The Directorate is also starting show some more flexibility in its approach to

contracts. The government is looking at legislation that would ensure that money paid to lead contractors is flow-ing down the food chain to subcontractors – something that has not always happened, leaving smaller companies in financial difficulty even if the Directorate is paying its bills. We are undertaking a decisive change in the law on public tenders so that all subcontractors are defined and I will have to know that everyone has been paid. That will be a condition of paying the general contractor, said Witecki. The Directorate is also promising to pay funds as soon as the correct paperwork is received instead of delaying pay-ment for 47 days as allowed under contracts, something that created cash flow problems for contractors in the past. As well, new contracts will allow for a prepayment of up to 10% of the bid amount in order to help with cash flow, something increasingly important because banks are now very unwilling to lend to contractors. Banks are now terri-fied, they see these as toxic assets, said Radziwiłł.

New tenders will also allow for some risk sharing in the event that raw materials prices move against contractors, although they will also contain provisions allowing the Directorate to claw back some costs if prices fall. The gov-ernment is also working on an EU-compliant definition of ex-cessively low bids, making it easier to knock off bids whose costs seem wildly out of proportion to the Directorate’s es-timates. That doesn’t make the present situation any less bitter for people like Wiśniewski, who has seen his life’s work close to collapse. If we could go back in time, I think all sides would change their approach, but we’ve signed contracts and we’re bound by them, he said. by Jan Cienski

tors when doing so seemed to be a no-risk proposition. Fulfilling EU obligations meant that the conditions given us contractors were very demanding. We all wanted to do well, but it ended badly, said Jerzy Wiśniewski, the found-er of PBg, one of Poland’s largest contractors, which de-clared bankruptcy in June after mis-pricing several highway construction projects.

Misplaced expectationsWhen the general directorate of National roads and motorways announced the tenders, the construction industry engaged in a race to the bottom, competing so fiercely to win con-tracts that they left themselves no margin for error. I would have preferred to have spaced it out over time, but we had to conclude the investment process by 2015, said Lech Witecki, head of the Directorate. The reason is that 2015 is the last year in which projects under the EU’s 2007-2012 budget can still be reimbursed. Also playing a role was the government’s mad push to get high-profile highway projects completed before this June, when Poland was co-host of the European football championships. We warned

FiNANCiAl BlOOdBATh ON The highwAyS

Jan Cienski is the Warsaw and Prague correspondent for the Financial Times. He has been in Warsaw since 2003. Prior to that he spent five years as the Washing-ton correspondent for the National Post, a Canadian newspaper. He also spent several years in the US work-ing for the Associated Press. From 1992 to 1995 he worked in Moscow for the Ger-man News Agency DPA. Jan has a degree in international rela-tions from the Univer-sity of Toronto.

The A1 highway construction on the Nowe Marzy-Toruń section. Once com-pleted, it will run from Gdańsk in the north of Poland, to the Czech border in the south.

Flaws in infrastructure tenders have been disastrous for Poland’s construction industry

‘dozens of contractors have gone bust this year alone’

economy economy

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‘The deal for 470 railway cars isworth eUr 1.2 bn and starts from december 2013’

On track for global opportunitieseconomy

A big firm from a small Polish city to provide trains of the future for Germany

Polish rolling stock manufac-turer PESA Bydgoszcz SA has signed a five-year contract with Deutsche Bahn Regio AG to supply the German national rail network with up to 470 railway cars. The deal, which is worth up to EUR 1.2 bln and carries a pos-sible two year extension, starts from December 2013. The vehicle to be delivered is the new diesel-powered Link train, which the company is un-derstandably proud of. 'ink is the best DMU (diesel multiple unit) in Europe at the moment said PESA’s CFO, Robert Świechowicz. The deal was inked in Berlin at the InnoTrans fair, where PESA also presented two other ve-hicles: the Gama locomotive and the Twist tram, and signed a contract with Lithuanian Railways to supply three

630M diesel vehicles to add to the 10 bought between 2008 - 2011. To cap an already triumphant few days for the Bydgoszcz-based vehicle manu-facturer, the company presented the first of 12 Link trains to German car-rier Regentalbahn AG - whose presi-dent Gerhard Knoebel said: its interior and exterior design sets the standard for German railways – and took orders from Czech carrier ĆeskeDrahy for 31 trains and West Pomerania voivodship (Zachodniopomorskie) for two.

This contract is not just a business suc-cess for PESA, which was on the verge of bankruptcy 10 years ago, said Adrian Furgalski, a member of the board of TOR Transport Consultants Group and director of the Railway Business Forum. It is an economic success for Poland and a reason to be proud of yet another product 'made in Poland' and now gone international. The position of Poland as one the top exporters of (railway) cars and buses is undeniable. Several factories, including PESA, have introduced new cars and engines to the market and are characterized by west-ern quality and cheaper Polish price, which under the global economic cir-cumstances is an important factor for all railway related businesses.

According to Piotr Michalczyk, a Director at PwC in Poland, the deal could have wider positive connota-tions for Polish business, not only in the transport sector. This agreement, the first between the two companies, could help PESA to play more than a regional role and  potentially to open other significant markets, he said. Additionally, it is a chance to increase the exchange of technical knowledge, as many components will be sourced from German suppliers. In a global per-spective, this deal could change the perception of Polish companies and strengthen their position during other significant international tenders, not on-ly in this particular industry, he added.The Gama is a powerful diesel fam-ily of vehicles which can be used for either freight or passenger use and can be reconfigured to adapt to different countries and used for cross-border traffic. The Twist tram is for carriers operating in medium-sized cities with smaller passenger streams. The first city to order the model was Częstochowa, popula-tion 240,000, which ordered seven. by Richard Stephens

One of PESA's trains at the InnoTrans fair in Berlin, where the Bydgoszcz-based company signed the biggest deal in its history with Deutsche Bahn AG

pesa bydgoszczcompany profile: PESA Bydgoszcz SA deals with rail rolling stock construction, upgrading and repairs. It is a Polish company with more than 160 years of tradition, cooperating with leading research and scientific centres. From a design developed by a team of 200 designers working in the R&D Department to the ready vehicle, tested on PESA's own test tracks, all products are created in the manufacturing proc-ess performed by PESA Bydgoszcz.

30

Polish football fans’ dreams of a return to the glory days of the 1970s and 1980s were dashed when their team crashed out in the group stage of euro 2012. But hosting the high-profile European championship was always go-ing to be about far more than the action on the pitch for a country looking to change its image on the global stage and reap rewards on the economic front. On a string on non-sporting counts, Poland is upbeat about what it sees as a resounding success at the 16-team tournament, which was co-hosted with neighbouring Ukraine and ran from June 8 to July 1. Having won plaudits from both the sport’s European govern-ing body UeFA and the foreign fans who flooded in, the country aims to capitalise on its three weeks in the global spotlight. In addition, the pressure to get ready was a catalyst for a string of long-delayed in-frastructure projects, including new mo-torways and airports.

Up there with ‘going forward’, ‘lever-age’ and a multitude of other buzzwords, ‘legacy’ is a label stuck on international sporting showcases of all shapes and sizes. Often maligned by critics as little more than jargon that masks window-dressing, it has real meaning for Poland, which understood from the outset the significance of the first-ever edition of the quadrennial tournament to take place behind the former Iron Curtain. There are many elements to the thing that we call legacy, said Mikołaj Piotrowski, commu-nications chief at Pl.2012, the state-run body that oversaw preparations for eve-rything but the action on the pitch. From the very first day it was a story about de-velopment, change and strengthening our image, he explained. We showed the world that we’re a reliable partner in these very difficult times and reliability today is the currency that doesn’t lose value. It could have been a very different mat-ter, if the critics had been proven right. When UEFA de-cided in April 2007 to pick Poland and Ukraine’s bid to host the championship over that of the favourite Italy, naysayers claimed it was a major mistake. Attention remained locked on the massive infrastructure challenges facing the region, with fears that neither country would be prepared in time to handle the influx of fans. UEFA itself upped the pres-sure via a string of damning reports about the host nations’ readiness. Poland was embarrassed by a series of delays in the construction of Warsaw’s new National Stadium, venue for the opening match. Its problems came to be overshad-owed by those of Ukraine, however, with the weeks before the tournament seeing threats of a boycott by European

of fans who flooded into Poland either to attend matches or simply soak up the atmosphere was 600,000 short of the hoped-for 700,000 to one million. But at 900 million zloty (EUR 216 million), their spending during the three weeks of play beat the forecast of 768 million zloty (EUR 184 million), according to PL.2012’s figures. Over and above that short-term injection of cash, Poland hopes to build on word-of-mouth publicity from supporters, who have given the country the thumbs up. The vast majority had never been to Poland before. A full 85 % of a representative sam-ple of 4,009 foreign fans in Poland surveyed by the PBS public opinion institute at the end of the tournament had a positive view. A total of 92 % said they would recommend Poland as a tourist destination, and 80 % that they were likely to come back themselves. When people were thinking about Poland before Euro 2012, they were thinking about a country with bears on the street or something, joked Marta Brzegowa, the capital Warsaw’s Euro 2012 spokeswom-an. We showed people from another part of Europe that we’re a modern, growing capital and really in the heart of Europe. That’s very important for us. Along with the Baltic

port of Gdańsk, the western city of Poznań and Wrocław in the southwest, Warsaw formed the quartet of Polish cities that hosted matches. The good feedback about the cities among foreign tourists should pay off. Maybe not tomor-row, nor in a month, but everything that was done ahead of Euro 2012 and during the tournament will be of benefit, according to analyst Halina Wasilewska-Trenkner, a former member of Poland’s monetary Policy Council. Poland, far from being a first-choice visitor destination, aims to climb the global rankings. Experts estimate that thanks to the Euro 2012 feedback, the number of foreign tourists, cur-rently 10 million a year, could jump to 13.6 million in 2013 and continue to rise by 500,000 a year up to 2020.

The Barcelona Effect – in Poland?Poland is tapping lessons from Austria, which, although already a leading ski destination, strove to change its pro-file thanks to Euro 2008. The city of Innsbruck is one ex-ample. Innsbruck’s reputation as tourist city in the ’Heart of the Alps’, as well as a top destination for sport events, has grown a lot, noted Michael Bielowski, managing direc-

leaders over Kiev’s treatment of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko. There were also stark warnings of racist violence in the two countries’ stadiums, fueled by the BBC’s ‘Stadiums of Hate’ documentary.

Platini’s prideHowever, what needed to be built was finally built. And apart from skirmishes between Russian and Polish fans pri-or to a group match in Warsaw and incidents of racial abuse that led to fines for the Russian, Spanish and Croatian foot-

ball federations, the tournament largely avoided controversy and turned into a giant party. The overwhelming feeling I have today is pride, UEFA chief Michel Platini said as Euro 2012 wrapped up. Pride for Poland and Ukraine, so often de-cried but who proved they were up to the task by putting on such a great tourna-ment. And pride for the people of Poland and Ukraine, who were such wonderful hosts. UEFA is right to be pleased, and not just because of the festive atmos-phere. We had 1.44 million attendance, and we sold 100 percent of the tickets. That’s the first time we’ve really sold 100% of the tickets,’ said Martin Kallen, UEFA’s operations director. He acknowledged that there was disappointment over no-shows at some games, which led to gaps in stadiums that were all-too visible dur-ing some match broadcasts. One of the down points was that we sold 100 percent of the tickets but for attendance we had 98.6%, so in some matches we could see that seats were empty. They were all sold, but some people didn’t attend for some reason. But that’s still a very high number and a fantastic achievement from our side in the ticketing area. In addition to sup-

porters inside the eight stadiums in Poland and Ukraine, a total of seven million people watched matches by live link in the host countries’ fanzones, up from 4.2 million at Euro 2008 in Switzerland and Austria. The European champion-ships are UEFA’s financial engine, and income hit EUR 1.383 billion at Euro 2012, up from EUR 1.351 billion at the 2008 edition. TV rights sales, which traditionally form the bulk of that sum, were EUR 815 million, up from 780 million. Cost figures are still being calculated, but Kallen said the final re-sult was likely to be a whisker less than at Euro 2008, where operating profit was EUR 700 million. The lion’s share of Euro profits is used to fund grassroots football develop-ment in UEFA’s 53 member associations.

It’s not just UEFA which came away happy from Euro 2012 on the financial front. Official figures show that the number

The POliSh eFFeCT ShiNeS ON

Jonathan Fowler has been an Agence France-Presse cor-respondent in Poland since the end of 2006. He focused on the build-up to EURO 2012, was part of the coverage team and is now probing the com-petition’s legacy in Po-land. Prior to Warsaw, Jonathan was based in Geneva, covering the UN, the Interna-tional Committee of the Red Cross and sports bodies such as FIFA, UEFA and the IOC, working thereoriginally for the AP and then for AFP.

The Legacy of Poland’s biggest ever sporting event

‘when UeFA decided

in April 2007 to pick Poland and Ukraine’s bid to host the championship

over that of the favourite

italy, naysayers claimed it was

a major mistake’

euRo 2012

Morskie Oko lake is one of the most popular tourist des-tinations in the Tatra Mountains, visited by thousands of trekkers every day. More foreigners should be among them in the future because of the long term tourism benefits of the competition.

The last construc-tion works on the A2 highway at a junc-tion between Jawc-zyce and Pruszków. EURO 2012 speeded up infrastructure investment dramati-cally.

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32 tor of Olympiaworld, which oversees its sporting venues. Since 2008 we’ve had a steady growth in tourist over-night stays of between three and eight percent per year, a bet-ter image as a summer destination, and reached new mar-kets.’ Portugal also managed to diversify its tourist make-up after hosting Euro 2004, spreading beyond the tradition-al Algarve-focused clientele. Also high in experts minds is Spain, notably the Catalan metropolis of Barcelona. That comparison is less outlandish than it seems, and goes be-yond tourism, because the Barcelona Effect’ is economist-speak for the long-term benefits of hosting a sporting event. In Barcelona’s case, it was the 1992 Olympics, preparations for which saw a massive refurbishment drive and major infrastructure projects that pale in comparison with those in Poland two decades later. While the city was already on the tourist circuit, the number of visitors began climbing in the years immediately before the games and continued to do so as it became a magnet. A contributing factor was that Spain was also in the spotlight the same year thanks to the expo in Seville while Madrid was the european Capital of Culture. Now there will be the Barcelona Effect, but al-

so the Polish Effect. We believe that we have the right to use this expression, said Piotrowski. The Polish Effect connects a lot of elements - country modernisation, strengthening the image of the country, social engagement and social capital, he said, the latter a reference to the thou-sands of volunteers who turned out to help foreign fans. And, maybe not so spectacular, the gathering of experi-ence for the future, not only in terms of big sports events, but in terms of man-aging things here inside our country. For Innsbruck’s Bielowski, such ‘soft skills’ are as significant as the measurable eco-nomic impact, creating a pool of ability and encouraging future event organis-ers. His city has since played host to the 2010 European handball championship and the 2011 volleyball equivalent.Euro 2012 also went hand in hand with a vast programme of infrastructure devel-opment more or less linked to the tourna-ment. It helped Poland project a modern face to those unfamiliar with its econom-ic realities. After the dying days of com-munist rule, which still evoke an image of empty shelves and queues, Poland introduced sharp reforms following the regime’s 1989 fall. It has gradually clawed its way up from the low point of that era, and during the ongoing economic crisis has been the only member of the 27-na-tion EU to post growth. There have been

suggestions that Euro 2012 may have acted as a stimulus programme in all but name. Poland’s tournament-linked investment hit 94 billion zloty (EUR 22.5 billion), according to PL.2012’s data. Ninety percent was public money, with around half of that from the EU. Officials stress that most projects have not been sport-related. Only 4% of spend-ing went on the four Euro stadiums. The bulk was for a long-needed overhaul of the country’s transport network. We wanted to treat Euro 2012 as an engine, as a factor that would speed up a lot of investment projects, Piotrowski said,

noting that the gain was estimated at five years. I think it was the biggest modernisation project undergone during these hard, difficult times for the European economy. And we all see the results today. The country’s roads have long been seen as among the shoddiest in Europe, doubling the time taken to travel the same distances on Western high-ways, denting productivity and discouraging some foreign investors. Euro 2012 has had a really positive influence on the perception of Poland abroad. It’s a great opportunity to attract foreign investment, said Malgorzata Krzysztoszek of Polish employers’ federation lewiatan. Research has shown that improved productivity thanks to the time-gain in the completion of investment projects should add 2.0 percent-age points to Poland’s gross domestic product up to 2020. Despite grumbling about living on what has felt like a vast building site, Poles feel the changes when they take to the east-west highway connecting Warsaw to the German bor-der, a project that was barely ready in time for the tourna-ment, or check in at new airports or board cutting-edge trams. A source of discontent remains the country’s rail network, but even there there have been marked improve-ments. Critics have questioned why it took a sports event to speed up the process, but proponents turn that around, saying the unbreakable deadline provided a focal point that pushed different bodies to work together.

Stadiums, sprouting like mushrooms after the rainAnti-racism activists are also happy, saying Euro 2012 gave a boost to their work. Polish group Nigdy więcej (Never Again), which in 1996 launched Poland’s first football-fo-cused campaign and is part of the Football Against racism in Europe network, ran a major programme ahead of and during Euro 2012 with UEFA’s backing. Euro 2012 created a great possibility for spreading ideas and social campaigns like anti-racism or anti-discrimination, said Never Again’s Jacek Purski. I’m 100% sure that we reached an audience that we couldn’t ever have reached using any other oppor-tunity, he added. So actually what we are expecting now is more open doors in local football structures, local clubs, local NGOs, for cooperation. On the football industry side, Euro 2012 has also had an impact. 8000 stewards were trained to deal with crowd trouble, and they are fanning out across a Polish league long used to the vicious circle of hoo-liganism and the need to turn to riot police. While Warsaw’s National Stadium lacks links to a club and therefore will have to seek revenue from other events such as concerts, the country’s three other tournament arenas have become the new home of a trio of teams. The Euro effect also in-spired a stadium building boom in other cities. There were four new stadiums in the four host cities, but there were other stadiums built in other cities - Kraków and so on, said Kallen. ‘So for football, it’s a real legacy in terms of comfort, service level and also development in terms of football in the future. Take security. It has now reached a new level on the private side and it’s to be implemented throughout the country in all the clubs.’

The Polish public is as pleased as punch, surveys show. The PBS poll found that 94% reckoned their country had done a good job as co-host. As recently as September 2009, only 49% had said Euro 2012 would be a success on the or-ganisational front. By September 2011, that figure had hit 57%, before climbing to 63% in March this year and 85% just before kick off. A total of 92% said they would like Poland to host an-other major sporting event in the future. by Jonathan Fowler

‘research has shown that improved productivity thanks to the time-gain in the completion of investment projects should add 2.0 percentage points to Poland’s gdP up to 2020’

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euRo 2012

Primetime Warsaw

Warsaw, due to its history and significance at the crossroads between east & west, is one of europe’s great cities, the undisputed regional economic and political powerhouse.Basking in the recent glow of hosting eUrO 2012 and its status as capital of the european Union’s most dynamic economy, there has never been a better time for the city on the Vistula river.

This, the first conference to focus on Warsaw in its entirety, brings you the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

CONFERENCES

Thursday 21ST FEBRUARY 2013Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw

Primetime WarsawCONFERENCES

Thursday 21ST FEBRUARY 2013Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw

Welcome commentsCity of Warsaw

Keynote speechA vision for WarsawFacts, figures, trends and perspectives about Warsaw. How Warsaw compares with other capitals and major cities. What the city should concentrate on developing, which cities it should try to emulate, what mistakes it should avoid. What kind of leadership role should Warsaw play as the de facto capital city of Central & Eastern Europe?

panel DiscussionWarsaw… Poland… European Union… the World!Warsaw’s perspectives as the capital city of a dynamically developing EU country in an increasingly global village. How does Warsaw define its place in Poland, Europe and the world economy in these competitive and difficult economic times? What do industry leaders think about the city and its performance and perspectives? What are the priorities and plans of the city authorities.

panel DiscussionWe get around - integrating Warsaw’s transport networkHow Warsaw can benefit from a fully-integrated transport network truly of the 21st Century. What are the plans, what are the realities, how far can the city go? To what extent is sustainability a part of Warsaw’s transport plan?

Rolling Real estate panel discussionsOffice: We’re all downtown now – defining Warsaw’s emerging business districts.Retail: The future is… small! Towards community retail in big cities.Residential: What is the Warsaw buyer looking for today… and tomorrow?Warehouse: What is the future for city warehousing? How far out is too far?Holistic Sustainability: Reducing CO2 in buildings, thermo-modernisation of buildings, how to implement green transport.

panel discussionWarsaw City Masterplan. Where are we now and where are we headed?With city and district officials, architect, developer.

panel discussionRiverbank development. Unlocking the potential of Warsaw’s natural treasure, its Vistula riversides Warsaw is the only capital city in Europe with a relatively undeveloped riverside. Visitors are amazed when they see the sandy beaches and treelined banks. How to untap the vast potential of this ‘undiscovered’ area in the heart of the city while retaining its charm and nature.Interview with a senior representative of the City of WarsawConducted by a well-known interviewer/journalist

Conference languages: English, Polish and German (simultaneous translation) Moderator & Programme Creator: Richard Stephens, Poland Today Event organiser: Poland Today

photos by: Bartek Banaszak, Piotr Dziubak, Artur Gajdzinski,Jan Anderman (Forum)

Summary panel diScuSSionReflections on the unique city of Warsaw

cocktail party For conference attendees and invited guests

Special preSentationStefan Starzyński’s vision for Warsaw and how it’s being realized todayBy a leading expert on Stefan Starzyński

contact: tel. +48 694 922 898www.poland-today.pl

36 37BUildiNg ON SOlid grOUNdCaution in Poland’s commercial property market is advisable, but not necessarily pessimism

As the monetary crisis looms over markets and the numerous questions about the Eurozone that remain un-answered breed uncertainty all across the continent, real estate investors and developers in Poland appear to be content. The situation may not as dynamic as it was some years ago and the market requires a greater degree of cau-tion but many still see Poland as a relatively safe haven amongst the economic turmoil.

Trust you can build onPoland’s stable economy and political situation along with the size of the country are some of the most decisive fac-tors that make it an attractive destination for real estate investors. Michael Kroeger, head of international real estate finance at helaba Bank goes as far as saying that Poland is currently the place to go for many international inves-tors and their banks, and this, he believes, is likely to con-tinue into the future. Contrary to other countries in the region, Polish markets offer stability, continuous growth and professional participants. It is trust you can build on – literally,said Kroeger.

Kroeger is not isolated in his optimism. Real estate analysts and developers based in Poland share this view and point to projects that have been completed or contracted in recent months as proof. Poland is one of the most attractive busi-ness areas in Central and Eastern Europe due to considerable development poten-tial and a stable economy, said Jeroen van der Toolen, managing director at ghelamco, a developer with over 20 years’ experience in the office sector in Poland. Ghelamco’s lease agreements for this year, which amounted to 55,000 sqm, mark a record-high figure in the compa-ny’s history. Those contracts prove that the demand for high-quality space is still on a high level and the instability of the Eurozone has little influence on our cus-tomers, said van der Toolen.

Poland continues to attract investor in-terest for the right sorts of reasons: the economic and political situation, together with country size, ensure that institutional investors keep Poland very much on their radars, commented John Verpeleti, man-aging director – CEE investment services, Colliers inernational. 

Main challengesBut Verpeleti also points to the challenges facing the com-mercial property market in Poland and believes that the main question for the future will be whether enough qual-ity product will be available to satisfy those still interested. In addition, from investors’ perspective, if pricing levels are considered ‘too hot’ it may result in differentials with other markets becoming large enough to attract some or all of that interest away.  Markets are, after all, swings and round-abouts, and we would all do well to remember this dynamic, concluded Verpeleti.

Marek Koziarek, managing director at the department of commercial real estate finance at Pekao Bank, is more cau-tious and sees the stability of the Eurozone and its impact on the financing possibilites by banks as a key issue for the

real estate market. Currently European banks are facing un-dercapitalization problems and having risk concerns. Even if this issue does not concern Pekao or key Polish banks, the situation in Western Europe, - especially in Germany, as Poland main foreign trade partner - has a big influence on Polish economic growth, [and what follows] on the con-sumption and investment trends by the Polish population and the European investors. (…)Those factors steer the turnover in the shopping centers, commercial real estate investment demand, demand for apartments, demand from tenants side and the willingness of banks to finance.

Optimism in the office sectorHowever, if we look at the numbers the situation in the office sector does look optimistic. According to Colliers International the new supply of modern office space in the first half of this year was over 60% higher than in 2011, amounting to some 163,000 sqm. The leasing activity in the first six months of this year was also higher than in the same period in 2011 and reached 490,000 sqm. At the same time, rental rates in schemes under construction demonstrated

a downward trend, while rents in existing office buildings remained stable.

The office market in the capital and most regional cities continues its posi-tive trend from last year, agreed Paulina Misiak, head of tenant representation services, office department, Cushman & wakefield. Since the start of the year, 11  schemes totalling 110,300 sqm have been delivered to the Warsaw market, a result similar to the 125,300 sqm achieved over the whole of 2011. Despite strict lend-ing policies excercised by banks, new de-velopment starts have risen and the pipe-line is still growing, she added.

Supply and demand balanceThe most important issue facing the Polish office market today is the balance between supply and demand for office space. So far this year demand has re-mained at a strong level but it is not cer-tain that it will continue this way. Experts agree that the monetary conditions in the next 12 – 24 months are crucial to the sector as they influence the development plans and strategies of existing compa-nies or those who are looking at entering the country.

Indirectly, economic conditions affect the demand for office floor space and whilst demand continues to be stable there are risks of a decline in the near-future, said Brian Burgess, managing director at Savills Poland. Waldemar Lesiak, direc-tor of the office and hotel department, echo investment, also points to the link between development prospects for com-panies and demand for modern office space. If we don’t ex-perience a sudden macroeconomic downturn the demand for quality office space will continue to increase, he said. Lesiak notes, however, the importance of distinguishing between the Warsaw market and regional markets. While in the capital the supply-demand indicator remains at a satis-factory level, the negative impact of the financial crisis may still be seen in some of the regional markets, he explained.

An issue that is crucial to the supply-demand question is

Real estate Real estate

Anna Kapica- Harward writes on a variety of subjects related to real estate and economics but also covers social and cultural topics. A graduate from the University of London and Sheffield Hallam University, Anna has worked in the UK and Poland. In recent years she was a Real Estate Editor at the Warsaw Business Journal and Deputy Editor at Poland Monthly.

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38 39predictability. John Duckworth, managing director of Jones lang laSalle, believes that in the current economic climate ‘the spectrum of uncertainity has widened’ and sees two possible scenarios: A positive one with low vacancy levels and a constant or growing demand, and a negative one whereby the global crisis worsens causing a slowdown in Polish economy. This would push up vacancy levels, put pressure on rents and have a negative knock on effect on developers, investors and financiers. To predict which end of the spectrum the Polish office market will sit has be-come extremely difficult, if not impossible, said Duckworth. He adds, however, that given a large undersupply of good modern office stock compared with many European cities, as well as other social and economic factors, the long-term view is positive, though we may see a cooling of the market in the next two years.

Growing tenant expectationsAnother challenge for office space developers is to opti-mise investment costs in view of the growing expectations from tenants. There is an increasing demand for high qual-ity office space which offers high flexibility and can be easily adapted to tenants’ needs as well as for properties located in areas with an easy access to public transport. More and more companies look for offices that are energy efficient and environmentally friendly.

Arkadiusz Rudzki, leasing and asset management direc-tor at Skanska Property Poland notes that such solutions will not only help them protect the environment but can also generate significant savings. Our view is that these aspects will in the near future play a greater part in the process of choosing a location, especially that tenants are mostly in-ernational institutions which pay a lot of attention to the quality of the work environment, said Rudzki.

A green profile for a commercial project, including such certificates as LEED or BREAM, is now a prerequi-site in the selection and negotiation process, agreed Peter Obernhuber, board member at UBm, and explained that global brands and multinational corporations are now ac-cepting ‘green aspects’ of the commercial projects as an integral part of A and A+ standards.

made solutions not solutions that we hope to grow into (…) We shouldn’t build anything too big just because we could, given the size of the plot, adds Frątczak. 

Warehouse dynamicsThough not without its problems, the Polish warehouse market may be one with the greatest opportunities in the near future. The relative strength of the Polish economy and growing logistics sector continue to drive demand for new space. Also the investors’ sentiment for Poland continues to be positive, said Bożena Krawczyk, investment director Central Europe of developer SegrO. Other logistics de-velopers echo Krawczyk’s optimism. In general the Polish warehouse market is in good shape with vacancy levels de-creasing and core locations being established and perform-ing well, said Ben Bannatyne, managing director at Prologis for Central and Eastern Europe.

In terms of the structure, the market is mostly focused on BTS and pre-lets, with speculative projects constitut-ing only a small part of it. Developers are oriented mainly on BTS or ‘pre-let’ projects; investments in speculative projects are now a small element of their business. In dif-ficult times investors are more careful and ‘count twice’ before deciding to take a risk and develop a speculative project, said Renata Osiecka, managing partner at con-sultancy Axi immo. As BTS projects are typically built for production companies, much of the development has moved to secondary and tertiary locations. However, as the investor - and lenders’ - appetite for this type of prod-uct softens, we expect to see a return to core locations, noted Bannatyne.

The logistics of opportunitiesA big opportunity for the warehouse sector lies in the de-velopment of e-commerce. It is likely to take over some of the space currently occupied by the retail sector as de-mand moves from ordinary stores to online shopping. It is hard to determine now how large this move will be, but it’s generally agreed that technological development is good for the logistics sector and is likely to gain pace when large internet retailers enter Poland. While in Poland e-commerce does not yet play as important a role as in the West, this market keeps growing every year. The delay has some ad-

vantages, too. By observing the growth of this segment abroad, we can avoid the errors and adapt tried and tested solutions, said Robert Dobrzycki, managing partner Central & Eastern Europe, Panattoni.

Infrastructure still the problemDobrzycki also believes that the development of road in-frastructure and e-commerce will affect centralisation in the warehouse and logistics segment and we will see more large facilities in central locations. In terms of industrial facilities, top locations are economic zones. Large logistic centres will still be built in Central Poland (Łódź, Stryków), Silesia, the outskirts of Wrocław and Poznań. However, lo-gistic space near the capital is expected to lose its nation-wide status and will gravitate towards the local market, with distribution as the prevailing aspect. Poor transportation infrastructure in Eastern Poland detracts from the invest-ment appeal of this region, perhaps with the exception of industrial facilities within economic zones. Until the infra-structure improves, even the cheaper labour pool than in the western part of the country is likely to fail to attract many investors.

A moderately positive outlookSo what’s in store for the commercial property market in 2013? Experts say that latest macroeconomic data indicate a slowdown in Poland’s economy with lower than expect-ed GDP figures affected by reduced consumer spending. This has resulted in to greater caution and questions being asked of Poland’s outlook for 2013.

Mike Atwell, head of CEE capital markets at CBRE, names three core fundamentals that are important in such situa-tions: occupational market performance, investors’ activity and availability of financing for investment transactions. Looking at Poland in the context of the above inspires more confidence. There are differences across all the markets in Poland but there is still occupational demand for quality projects in good locations, said Atwell. He concludes that 2013 is likely to be a year of reduced transactional activity but driven by three core fundamentals: firstly, strong oc-cupational markets; secondly, more equity based investors; and, thirdly, finance being readily available at the quality end of the market. by Anna Kapica-Harward

A word of caution for retail If green is the current word for the office sector, the word for retail is caution as the effect of the Eurozone crisis may be marked more in this sector than in the other two. The economic downturn has led to decreased demand and de-creased consumer spending as well as a growing popularity of discount stores. This is reflected by the turnover across all retailers, which means that retail chains are finding they need to adjust their development strategies and focus on what they know is safe. Retail chains are interested in further expansion, however, they are very cautious when evaluating potential locations. Some of them plan expansion in smaller cities, either through own stores, or more often in coopera-tion with franchise partners, said Dominika Jędrak, director, research and consultancy services, Colliers International.

However, Magdalena Frątczak, head of retail at CBre, remains quite upbeat about the situation: The Eurozone crisis doesn’t really effect Poland. It is a bit of a phantom fear, she said. Although the negative mood that prevails in most European countries can also be observed among Polish consumers, Frątczak stresses that the market con-tinues to develop at a decent pace. She also notes that Poland is still an interesting country for new brands and lists Victoria’s Secret, Marco Polo and Gap as some of the latest comers to the market. We are clearly an attractive location for new brands and this is in part due to our stable economy, said Frątczak.

Solutions for difficult timesAnalysts believe that one of the main challenges for the sector will be ensuring that current results stay on the same level. In order to come as close as possible to meeting this challenge retailers are better off choosing large shopping centres in big cities. In difficult times the best solution for retailers is to rent space in established projects, where they can take advantage of the potential offered by a well-func-tioning and well-known centre, all this at a minimal cost and risk, said Marcin Materny, retail director at Echo Investment. The advice for developers, meanwhile, is to put in every effort at the planning stage of the project to make certain that the scheme will provide exactly what is required but not more than that. More than ever now the market re-quires that we do our homework. We need to provide tailor-

Real estate Real estate

‘developers are oriented mainly on BTS or pre-let projects; investments in speculative projects are now a small element of their business’

‘Some chains plan expansion in smaller cities, either through their own stores, or in cooperation with franchise partners’

‘while in the capital the supply-demand indicator remains satisfactory, the negative impact of the financial crisis may still be seen in some regional markets’

‘while in Poland e-commerce does not yet play as important a role as in the west, this market keeps growing every year’

Renata Osiecka, Managing Partner at real estate consul-tancy AXI IMMO

Dominika Jędrak, Director, Research and Consultancy Services, at international real estate consultancy Colliers International

Waldemar Lesiak, Director of the Office and Hotel department at Polish property de-velopment company Echo Investment

Robert Dobrzycki, Managing Partner Central & Eastern Europe at interna-tional warehouse and logistics development company Panattoni

retail

Current situation: Retail sales in Poland went down by a cou-ple of percentage points in the first five months of 2012 over the same period in 2011 (June is not included because of distortions due to EURO 2012), most likely due to worries over the future of the economy. To what extent the drop continues will be something everyone involved in the retail market will be watching closely.The numbers: New stock completed in 2012 amounts to 260,000 sqm and comprises 19 new projects, including 10 new shopping centres, four extensions, three stand-alone retail warehouses and two retail parks. 31% of supply deliv-ered in H1 2012 is located in cites below 100,000 inhabitants meaning that growing numbers of the retail projects are smaller in scale than has hitherto been seen.Outlook: 600,000 sqm of new retail space will be delivered to the Polish market in 2012, spread equally over both large and smalle cities. Retail chains that entered the market in H1 2012 included fashion brands Karen Millen (British), Victoria’s Secret (American), Bonita (German) and LC Waikiki (Turkish), shoe brands Kari (Russian) and Tretorn (Swedish). New re-tailers American Eagle Outfitters and Bath & Body Works plan to enter by the end of 2012. The developer/owner: Ran Shtarkman, CEO of Plaza Centers: The main concern is whether the Polish economy will suffer from slowdown similar to other European countries. In my opinion, it is prone to resist the crisis once more. All of our three shopping centres, in Toruń, Zgorzelec and Suwałki, are performing well and showed improvement in the last year, so at the beginning of next year we plan to launch the construc-tion of our project in Łódź.

some social transfers are being scaled back, says a recent EBRD report. Are Warsaw’s office and retail sectors and Poland’s warehouse market any exception? Here is an outlook for 2013 and some important numbers to take into considera-tion. based on reports by CBRE, DTZ, Jones Lang LaSalle, REAS and Savills

office

Current situation: With 60% of Poland’s modern office space located in Warsaw, the capital’s office market is set for fur-ther growth. Almost 100,000 sqm of office space came to the market in H1, over 80% of 2011’s annual supply.The numbers: There’s relatively high demand for space. There was 300,000 sqm take-up in H1, an increasing vacancy rate at 7.4%, with prime office rents stable at around EUR 27 sqm. There’s 660,000 sqm of office space currently under construction. Outlook: Developers are to going to be busy in Warsaw, with the total volume of completions bringing office stock to 4.68 mln sqm of space by the end of 2014, up from 3,86 mln sqm at present. About 20% of the 2012-2014 development pipeline is currently pre-leased. The high supply will put ef-fective rent under further pressure, while the vacancy rate is set to increase. The broker: Tomasz Buras, Savills: With high office pipeline and a growing vacancy rate – especially resulting from older buildings coming back to the market – we will see a stronger turn into a tenant’s market in 2013. Incentives offered by de-velopers to tenants are already good and in some cases very generous, but may increase in the next 12-18 months.The institutional investor: Fabian Hellbusch, Union Investment: Poland has survived the stress test of the debt crisis with-out going into recession. The real economy, which feeds the property markets, is quite stable. We see favourable market conditions for real estate investments in Warsaw. But we will carefully watch if Poland will be able to keep on decoupling from the economic developments in Europe.

warehouse

Current situation: With the supply of large warehouse units drying up and speculative development significantly re-duced (8,3% of the total), tenants are often having a hard time finding the appropriate space. The numbers: 560,000 sqm of warehouse space leased in H1 2012, a 40% decrease y-o-y. At end of Q2 the vacancy rate is 11,7% (or 810,000 sqm, of which 375,500 sqm are lo-cated in the Warsaw area). Current modern warehouse stock stands at almost 7 mln sqm - the market has tripled in size since 2005. Over 245,000 sqm of warehouse space is under construction in H2 2012. H1 effective rents range between EUR 2,3 - 4 sqm.Outlook: A possible supply gap is on the way for the Polish industrial market. Developers might go back to a speculative development mode, but if this happens such projects will not be available on a large scale any time soon, coming onto the market earliest in the second half of next year. Meanwhile the vacancy rate is expected to remain more or less at the same level.Developer’s take: Bartosz Mierzwiak, Prologis: Starting from June/July this year we can see a change of mood and unfor-tunately it’s not a positive one. On the development side next year we don’t expect big changes. The built-to-suit projects will account for the majority of projects. There are tenants however, which is a good news for those who available space to let. Those looking to develop speculatively nevertheless should be warned: there are tough times ahead.The broker: Maciej Chmielewski, Colliers International: Demand for modern warehouse space is constantly grow-ing, leading to a decrease in vacancy in some regions in Poland which may result in rental rates going up. The major-ity of warehouses which are currently under construction are almost fully leased. Developers still have some land ready for new investments which may meet future tenants’ needs.

residential

Current situation: The so-called Developer Act of 2012 in-creased the number of newly released flats across Poland to record-high levels. With transaction volume remaining con-siderable, the number of unsold dwellings is also increasing, also partly due to banks tightening their mortgage policies. The numbers: In Q2 the total offer in the six urban centres (which 6 urban centres) neared 56,700, a 23% growth over the past twelve-month period. At the end of H1 Warsaw alone offered over 21,000 new units. Kraków is currently the most oversupplied city. Outlook: A slowdown in new projects is expected in the fol-lowing quarters. With the offer growing and stable sales, the sell-out period is being lengthened, currently seven quarters for Warsaw and Tri-City. The analyst: Paweł Sztejter, REAS: The number of transac-tions taking place in the residential market might fall, given the current developments!, yet unless other negative factors appear, its scale should be less dramatic than in 2009. The developer: Dror Kerem, Neocity: Oversupply on the Warsaw residential market will last for the next 2 years, till the end of 2014. Hence I expect slow activity during most of 2013. With raw material and financial costs on the increase, no further price reduction is expected. Towards the end of the year I believe banks will see stabilization of prices and will be more inclined to offer mortgages. 2015 will show some recovery. Nevertheless no one should expect the boom to return. If you wish to buy for your own use next year will be a good time to do so. If you wish to purchase as an investor you may want to wait to the end of 2014.

Mladen Petrov: is a Warsaw-based Bulgarian-born jour-nalist, most recently with Bloomberg Businessweek Polska. He is a frequent contributor to Capital, Bulgaria’s leading weekly publication. His articles have ap-peared in publications such as The Jewish Daily Forward (USA), Haaretz (Israel) and Malemen, Forbes and Newsweek in Poland. He is also a winner of the EU-funded

‚Journalists Against Discrimination’ award.

Cloudy with a ray of hopeA brief look at prospects for the Polish real estate market

Clouds are gathering over the economy. Poland saw a 3.5 % GDP growth in the first half of the year, but in 2012 it is to decline to 2,6-2,7%. Concerns about economic growth are increasing, despite forecasts for 2,9% growth in 2013. Next year growth should be significantly held back as public in-frastructure spending abates, and some social transfers are

being scaled back, says a recent EBRD report. Are Warsaw’s office and retail sectors and Poland’s warehouse market any exception? Here is an outlook for 2013 and some impor-tant numbers to take into consideration. by Mladen Petrov. Information based on reports by CBRE, Colliers International, DTZ, Jones Lang LaSalle, REAS and Savills

view of Warsaw's downtown and cranes working on the construction site of the National Stadium

‘we see favourable market conditions for real estate investments in warsaw’

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mUCh mOre TO COmePoland bracketed with Turkey as exciting investment destination for German and Austrian players

Poland is ‘right on top’ for German institutional and pri-vate real estate investors. Of the EUR 877 million spent in H1 2012, as reported by Jones lang laSalle, a large part of it was of German origin, or, more correctly, of German-speaking origin as it includes Austria as well. Austrian investors and developers have been active in Poland for a long time. Two current investments have attracted attention. This sum-mer Allianz real estate, the property subsidiary of German insurance giant Allianz, bought five office buildings in Warsaw’s Platinium Business Park for roughly EUR 173 mil-lion from globe Trade Center. Only a few weeks later we saw the purchase of Warsaw Financial Center for about EUR 210 million by a consortium of Allianz Real Estate, which holds an 87.5% share, and London-based Tristan Capital Partners, who have the remaining 12.5% share through their managed fund, Curzon Capital Partners iii. The vendors were Vienna-listed CA immo and Pramerica real estate investors.

With those purchases Allianz Real Estate is the ‘new kid’ among the German investors in Poland. Stefan Brendgen, CEO of Allianz Real Estate GmbH, explains: As part of our strategy of diversification, we have investigated the office

2011). There are no plans to stop. The next centre to be completed is in Bydgoszcz, with the opening scheduled for the end of 2014. Poland is the most exciting international market for ECE besides Turkey, said ECE CEO Alexander Otto. In Poland we see big potential for growth with new developments, refurbishments, and centre management.

IVG Immobilien’s Polish assets under management com-prise 14 buildings with nearly 140,000 sqm leasable space, an investment volume of around EUR 400 million. The clear focus of IVG is on investment, having stepped out of devel-opment. Money is currently being raised for the iVg warsaw Fund, whose closing is planned before the end of this year. Bernhard Berg, Chairman of the Management Board of iVg institutional Funds gmbh, said that: In Warsaw today a core-investment-strategy can be realized for offices and retail. Class A buildings with a wide multi-tenant structure exist, as do some more with a single-tenant-structure. Such invest-ments are our explicit recommendation for German institu-tional investors who are looking for good and stable returns.

Early starterAs already mentioned, Austrians were among the first in Poland. While Germans had chiefly been looking at Western Europe, the US and Asia as well, Austrians were fo-cused on CEE. Of the ‘big ones’ like CA immo Ag, immofinanz, UBm and warimpex, special mention must be made of Franz Jurkowitsch, CEO of Warimpex – a real pioneer. He became active in the Polish market in the middle of the 80’s with the Holiday Inn hotel in Warsaw. Poland is a core market for Warimpex. It was with good reason that in 2007 Warimpex was listed on both the Vienna and the Warsaw stock ex-changes, said Jurkowitsch. So far we have developed nine hotels and three office buildings in Poland. With nearly 40% of all our properties in the country, Poland has the biggest share in the gross asset value of Warimpex. The company’s signature assets are the Intercontinental Warsaw hotel and the Andel’s Hotel in Łódź, which is located in a refurbished textile factory of the Manufaktura complex.

Another part of Manufaktura - the shopping centre - has recently been acquired by Hamburg-based Union investment real estate gmbh.The seller of almost the whole scheme was a property firm owned by French companies Fonciere euris and rallye and by the project developer Apsys, who will continue to manage the centre. Offering some 112,500 sqm of rental space, the fully let property is currently the larg-est shopping centre in Poland. Union Investment has been active in the country since 2008. Our investment volume in Poland is around EUR 350 million, which is about 2% of our overall figures, said Fabian Hellbusch, Head of Real Estate Marketing & Communication at Union Investment. Our clients own a variety of office, retail, and hotel prop-erties. The UI portfolio includes offices Horizon Plaza and Zebra Tower in Warsaw as well as, for example, the 3 Stawy shopping centre in Katowice, purchased in 2008 from GE Real Estate.

Underestimated no longerCompared to 3 Stawy, the Silesia City Center shopping centre scheme in Katowice is much bigger - at 86,000 sqm it is among the five largest in Poland. It is also one of the 24 properties in Poland in which Vienna-based Austrian real estate giant Immofinanz is invested in. We are in office, retail, and logistics with an at-book-value of around EUR 935 million. The lion’s share is allotted at an almost 50:50 ratio in 18 office and three retail properties, commented

Manfred Wiltschnigg, Member of the Management Board of Immofinanz AG. And, similarly to ECE, Immofinanz is also a developer, with projects in the pipeline such as Nimbus office in Warsaw, Galeria Zamek shopping centre in Lublin

- on which construction is to start this year - as well as resi-dential project Dębowe Tarasy in Katowice, on which work started in June. Poland continues to feature as an attractive market, although the big boom might slow down soon. But Class-A properties in Class-A locations will still work and promise good yields. Our development activities should be seen against this background, Wiltschnigg explained, add-ing: Poland is one of the largest CEE-countries and still of-fers excellent perspectives for future development – not only in Warsaw, but in other large agglomerations as well.

This is a statement often heard by German-speaking players. International developer Sven von der Heyden, Chairman of Von der Heyden Group, has been active in Poland for more than 22 years and is betting on the City of Poznań, having built a series of Class A Office buildings in Warsaw. We have so far completed two office buildings in the centre, the Poznań Financial Center and Andersia Tower. The third one, Andersia Business Center, is slated for completion in November. PFC was acquired by former Allied Irish Bank subsidiary BZWBK Real Estate Fund and the latter by German open ended Fund DEKA Immobilien. We are slightly behind our original leasing expectations given the overall macro-economic environment, admited Von der Heyden, but have now closed a couple of leases and shall reach 35-40% occupancy by the end of the year.

The general outlook for Poland is very positive. Or, as Franz Jurkowitsch from Warimpex puts it: In Europe we generally have to fight with instable market con-ditions. Poland is not totally out of this, but we can assume the further growth of Poland’s economy. After the fall of the iron curtain many international investors underestimated Poland. A strong domestic market, budget discipline, a stable currency, a well-educated and motivated population as well as con-tinuing economic growth were, and still are, essential rea-sons to count on Poland. For Warimpex, the country will stay one of our most important markets. Currently we are looking for development opportunities, promising success, said Jurkowitsch of Warimpex. Hellbusch echoed him: Investors are looking for markets without potential for back-lash. Poland did much better in absorbing the impact of the euro crisis than many other European countries. Besides Warsaw, especially Łódź, Kraków and Wrocław are inter-esting regions for investments. We’re keeping an eye on all locations for office, retail and hotel investments, however. Allianz Real Estate’s Stefan Brendgen stated almost the same: Although we recognize positive and promising eco-nomic data in Poland in general, so far the capital Warsaw, with its robust economy and promising development per-spectives, is our focus. But we are also investigating regional centers like Łódź, Kraków, Gdańsk, Katowice or Wrocław. Given the limited demand for offices there, our interest in those cities is mainly on shopping centres, confirmed Allianz's Stefan Brendgen. Further acquisitions are in the pipeline, we are in good talks. After the first two transactions this year we would like to enlarge our footprint in Poland. by Andreas Schiller

and retail markets in Poland for many years and did some due diligence regarding investment opportunities. With Platinium Park and WFC this year we made our debut as investors. Not a small debut, one might add. The com-bined share of both investments in the portfolio of Allianz Real Estate Germany is around 8%, he states. In contrast to Allianz, iVg immobilien Ag - headquartered in Bonn and Frankfurt - has been in Poland for many years now, as has deutsche grundbesitz, the predecessor of todays’ RREEF, the real estate investment arm of deutsche Bank. Both acquired their first assets at the beginning of the 2000’s. Some of the purchases at that time included shares in shopping centres: for Deutsche Grundbesitz in ‘Galeria Łódzka’, opened in 2002, for IVG in Wrocław’s ‘Galeria Dominikańska’, opened in 2001. Both centres were developed by German devel-oper eCe – their first in Poland. All three players not only stayed in Poland, but have been a notable success story with their investments and developments.

ECE meanwhile has six centres under management – the two just mentioned plus two in Gdańsk, one in Kraków and one in Szczecin (Galeria Kaskada, opened in September

Real estate

Andreas Schiller is Editor-in-chief of SPH Newsletter, after having been Editor-in- chief of German real estate magazineIm-mobilien Manager from 1996 to 2003 Andreas spent four years as its pub-lisher before opening Schiller Publishing House. He is a regular con-tributor to Frank-furter Allgemeine Zei-tung and to Austrian daily Der Standard.

‘After the fall of the iron

curtain many international

investors underestimated

Poland’

Stefan Brendgen, CEO of Allianz Real Estate GmbH

Fabian Hellbusch, Head of Real Estate Marketing & Communication at Union Investment

Alexander Otto, CEO of ECE Projektmanagement

Bernhard Berg, Chairman of the Management Board of IVG Institutional Funds GmbH

Manfred Wiltschnigg, Member of the Management Board of Immofinanz AG

Franz Jurkowitsch, CEO of Warimpex

Sven von der Heyden, Chairman of Von der Hayden Group

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try’s football fans. These have in turn made no secret of their disgust at the ruling PO (Civic Platform) and its leader, Donald Tusk, ironically a football aficionado who in his mid-fifties continues to play the game himself. The gazeta Polska weekly, a robust supporter of PiS, makes no secret of its interest in football fans, implying that they are true patriots and, by implication, potential PiS voters. A recent article bemoaned that efforts to clean up the terraces will turn football into a ‘boring spectacle’. In the article, Wojciech Mucha wrote we can expect segmentation on the terraces, stewards, that the loudest fans will be herded into small sectors, and then got rid of altogether....It will all be well be-haved, clean, safe and horribly boring. Right-wing politicians have been more than reserved in their criticism of football hooligans. PiS politicians have vouched for hooligans ar-rested by the police. Marek Suski, one of the party’s leaders, repeatedly refused in a recent radio interview to condemn those fans who went after the Russians before the Poland-Russia match. He even went as far as to compare the in-cident with the Soviet massacre of Poles at Katyń in 1940. I want to remind you that it was they who murdered us there. We weren’t the ones who invaded them on 17th September (1939). It was them. …there is much more aggression by the Russians towards us than there is by us towards them, he told Radio Tok FM.

Limited shock valuePoland is not rife with racism. But racist groups are very active both on the football terraces and the internet. Not enough is being done to put such people on the de-fensive. The authorities appear to be passively tolerating a social phenomenon that they see as difficult to combat and

of limited social relevance. The public has become accus-tomed to racist behaviour on the terraces and on the net. Anti-Semitic slogans daubed on walls in Łódz or Warsaw shock passers-by little more than the sight of overfilled rubbish bins. The Panorama programme came as a jolt. It exposed something that people had stopped noticing. And after the programme many, including the authorities, simply went into denial, pretending there was no problem or pointing out there was more anti-Semitism in France. But the problem does exist, and it is not just a question of Poland’s image, but also of the domestic political cli-mate. The flirtation between the political right and the thinking wing of the football hooligan community threat-ens to slow down the development of a tolerant society. That threat is greater in difficult economic times, when hardship strengthens authoritarian attitudes. A fascination with fascism, the sight of outstretched hands making the Nazi salute, even if performed by mere hundreds of young people at a local football match, should not be disregarded. Even if the great majority doesn’t care or indeed notice. by Krzysztof Bobiński

Fans watching the opening game of the Euro at the fanzone in Warsaw. Poland tied with Greece 1:1. Hooligans on the terraces and outside the stadiums keep families away from supporting football.

‘euro 2012 was attended by middle-class fans who all too often stay away from ordinary weekend matches for fear of what might happen to them if they fall foul of the mob’

Last summer’s Euro 2012 footballing enthusiasms in Poland seem long past. The championship was the source of sporting thrills, but it also sparked an important debate over charges of racism in Poland made public by a BBC Panorama documentary broadcast before the champion-ship. Panorama suggested that Polish football fans are rab-id racists, and that anyone dark-skinned would do well to stay away because if they came, they might come back in a coffin in former England captain Sol Campbell’s memora-ble phrase, broadcast in the programme. The documentary shocked Poles, who were gearing up to greet fans from all over Europe. Just as the country stood braced with a welcoming smile, arms outstretched and armed with the slogan ‘feel like at home’, a BBC programme that implied all Poles were racists came like a stab in the back.

The outcome belied Sol Campbell’s warning. There were few incidents on the terraces. The Croatian football associ-ation was fined EUR 80,000 after some of their fans made monkey noises at Italy’s Mario Balotelli, and the same player was similarly treated by a couple of hundred of Spaniards in their match with Italy. Otherwise, the fan zones were a happy tangle of thousands of fans cheering the teams of their choice as they played on massive television screens, while the various foreign teams were welcomed in their hotels by Poles delighted to see many of football’s greatest names in their midst. There were clashes in Warsaw before the Poland-Russia match, with Poles provoking Russian fans who seemed happy to be provoked. However, the skirmishes replaying age old hatreds were soon (literally) squashed by Polish riot police and never turned into the full scale war that some feared. As the championship contin-ued, and after clips showing how friendly Poles were to for-eigners appeared on You Tube, while the newspapers and broadcast media reacted defensively, criticising the BBC for not being fair. Racism was not just a Polish phenom-enon, they said, adding that things were worse elsewhere. Some even claimed that the whole issue of Polish racism and anti-Semitism had been blown out of all proportion by the British broadcaster in order to sabotage the Euro championships, to get more people to travel to London for the Olympics.

No lead from the authorities, including PZPNSo what had the fuss all been about? The truth is, there is a problem. The Panorama reporter, Chris Rogers, had merely taken a camera to league matches in Poland and Ukraine, the co-hosts of the championships, and filmed what he had seen. And he had seen fans chanting anti-Semitic slogans, sporting racist symbols and generally showing that racist right-wing politics is part of football fan culture in Poland. Chants of Jude Jude Judeaimed at opposing sides are not uncommon at league matches, while fans of third and fourth division clubs ape their ‘betters’ from the top league by displaying similar symbols and behaviour. The cases are

well documented by Nigdy więcej (Never Again), an anti-fascist group headed by Rafał Pańkowski, which worked with UeFA to combat racism before and during euro 2012. Panorama showed racist slogans daubed on urban walls and houses and left to fester by seemingly indifferent city authorities. Football club managements also don’t seem to care about this kind of behaviour and nor does PZPN, the Polish football authority, which in its arrogance failed to respond to requests from Panorama to comment on the scenes which Chris Rogers had filmed.

The chief reason which this racist behaviour did not seep into the Euro stadiums is that Poland’s hardcore fans had in the main not been there. The ticket prices had been too high, the distribution system had militated against them, and simply watching football is not what they do, attuned as they are to tribal loyalty to their local clubs and their home turf. In fact, Euro 2012 was attended by middle-class fans who all too often stay away from ordi-nary weekend matches for fear of what might happen to them if they fall foul of the mob. What does all this tell us about the level of racism and, more particularly, anti-Semitism in Polish society at large? According to research by Antoni Sułek, a respected sociologist, the last ten years have seen a marked fall in anti-Semitic attitudes. In 2002, as many as 43% of Poles said that Jews had too great an influence on the country. Ten years later, that number had fallen to 19%. The same number spontaneously re-plied ‘Jews’ when asked which minority in Poland had too much influence ten years ago, but a mere 6% said so this year. The numbers are not high, but they are high enough to fuel racist attitudes in the stadiums and on the inter-net, where anonymous commentaries are rife with racism. The publishers of such websites seem to care little about the social impact of these kind of sentiments. Little at-tempt is made to censor these remarks, which more often than not contravene Poland’s racial hate laws. These, in turn, are far too rarely invoked.

Where’s the support?A case in point is that of Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, who, tired of anti-Semitic remarks on the internet about him and his wife Anne Applebaum, a well-known journalist, asked the public prosecutor’s office in April 2011 to pursue the authors. Over a year later, the prosecutor’s office declined, arguing that there was ‘no public interest in such an investigation’. The office suggested that if the minister wanted, he could bring a private case against the perpetrators. Sikorski declined to do so. Nevertheless, he said that he was well aware of the damage done by such racist behaviour both on the internet and the football ter-races to Poland’s image abroad.

There are also the domestic political implications. Poland’s right-wing opposition parties, such as PiS (law and Justice), have for some time taken a supportive interest in the coun-

The dANger iN SileNCe

Krzysztof Bobiński is the head of Unia & Polska, a pro European organiza-tion. He was till the year 2000 the Warsaw correspondent of the Financial Times. Currently he writes occasionally for open-Democracy.org and the European Voice.

Racism in Poland is not rife, but it is tolerated. This is the problem.

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46 47entation, which, according to Nikrant, wasn’t true. I didn’t say what my sexual orientation was on election night. Do you know anyone who writes that they are gay on their CV? Where, under ex-perience? Some people in the village knew that Nikrant was gay, and when someone asked him about it after the election he saw no reason to avoid it. I hate pretending, I’d rather live my life exactly the way I am. Super express, the biggest (how do you define biggest’?) Polish tabloid, did an article where they asked people in Leśniewo with an age average of 60-70 about their gay may-or. ‘Their attitudes were more negative. They said I was hiding the fact that I was gay. No one confronted him di-rectly, however. Otherwise, the reac-tions were mostly positive. I got con-gratulatory emails from all around the country, my mailbox was full. He even got queries from institutions such as the Nowy Theater in Krakow asking whether he needed funding for trips for the poor children in his village.

Boardwalks and amphitheatersWhile that particular offer didn’t come to pass, Nikrant, who wasn’t born in Leśniewo, but in another small seaside town, is constantly trying to acquire funds from different sources for his various plans around the village. So far, so good, according to Mr. Mayor, as his friends call him. I’m generally satisfied, everything is going very well. With his village council, composed of the head of the culture club, the chief volunteer firefighter and the local sports coach, they renovated four bus stops and im-proved road safety with speed bumps, new traffic and street signs. Nikrant started a state-of-the-art website with a 40,000 visit count since January through which his constituents can li-aise with the council. He is most proud of renovating the reservoir area, com-plete with benches and a mini board-walk, as the people of Leśniewo call it. Nikrant won’t stop at that, however. The young mayor has big plans - he wants to renovate the village amphitheater behind the fire station. But we need funds, funds, funds, he says. The vil-lage’s yearly budget, at around 35,000 zloty is astoundingly small and he has to apply to the district authorities for additional funding. This year Leśniewo received an additional 23,000 zloty.

What’s a few letters in front of one’s name?When asked about his future in poli-tics, Nikrant looks down and smiles.

He doesn’t deny that he has had vague thoughts of doing something more, going further in politics, but he claims to be living in the moment. Right now I am very happy and sat-isfied, however my priorities might change in a couple of years, he says. Up until recently he was also working as a manager at a supermarket chain, but he says that he had no perspec-tives for professional development there. Now Nikrant wants to devote himself to being mayor, even though he only receives a small stipend. There are more possibilities, more time for my constituents, for my family, for my partner, he says. He quit his land-scape architecture studies, explaining that he doesn’t need a few letters in front of his name (in Polish you put M.A. before your name, not after) to be happy in life.

Nikrant, smiling, repeatedly says that he is in a good place right now. But this came after some difficult years of bullying, which started in elemen-tary school. Over time, I gained some confidence, a thick skin, I changed the negativity into a tool that helps me, he says. For this change he credits his in-volvement in the Campaign Against Homophobia, a non-heteronorma-tive environment, as he describes it, where he met other homosexual people. Then I stopped being afraid, I told myself: Marcin you do not have a problem with this. That was two and a half years ago. Though now he feels relatively safe even in his small vil-lage, he says that a few years back he would experience violence and hatred on Polish streets.

The times are changingI ask him what has changed in Poland, especially considering that a few months after he was elected mayor, a homosexual man and a transsexual woman were elected to the Polish na-tional parliament. Awareness within Polish society is changing, he says, attributing it to the efforts of hu-man rights NGOs and to the increas-ing presence of an open-minded youth in the nation. People started understanding that I am not hurting anyone with my sexual orientation, adding that the once-prevalent stere-otype of a gay man also being a pae-dophile is disappearing. On the cov-er of the Polish edition of Newsweek there was a homosexual couple of two mothers – a few years ago that was unthinkable, says Nikrant. by Hanna Kozłowska

society

I sit in the oversized red couches of the lobby of the Forum Novotel hotel in Warsaw, waiting to inter-view Marcin Nikrant, the first open-ly gay village mayor in Poland, for a good ten minutes before I realize that he is actually sitting on the couch next to mine. He looks almost noth-ing like in the photos I had seen be-fore. He is blonder, more tanned and wearing summer, non-mayor-like at-tire. Sitting in his blue t-shirt, match-ing watch, grass green shorts and red Converse shoes on the huge red sofa he almost looks like a Roy Lichtenstein painting. We laugh realizing that we were waiting for each other. Nikrant was elected village mayor, or ‘sołtys,’ of Leśniewo, located in northwestern Poland and with a population of 1500, when he was 26, in February 2011. It was his second attempt, after a failed campaign in 2007, a year before he came out as being gay. According to Nikrant he didn’t get the position at the first attempt because of his unripe age. Four years later, with a number of people in the village aware that he was gay, he was finally elected, and with an overwhelming majority. Nikrant describes the job of a sołtys as rep-resenting ones constituents, primarily dealing with mundane but important things such as potholes, malfunction-ing drainage or stray dogs. There is this stereotype of a village mayor as an older man who has a farm. I am far from this stereotype, but I do take care of stereotypical things, such as dogs barking in the middle of the night or at-tacking ducks and chickens, he laughs. When he reaches for the Coke he or-dered, he reveals tattoos of stars on the insides of his wrists.

Where do you write that you’re gay on a CV?Nikrant is in Warsaw for workshops supporting the Campaign Against homophobia (KPh), where he has been active for the past two and a half years in the Together Safer programme (Razem Bezpieczniej) which offers on-line help to the victims of violence and hate due to their sexual orientation. When the campaign found out that he was elected mayor of Lesniewo, the news went viral, and after a Q and A in replika, the campaign’s publication, a series of articles, profiles and inter-views in some of the biggest Polish publications followed. Most of the in-terviewers did, however, get one thing wrong. They made it seem that every-body knew about Nikrant’s sexual ori-

A new kind of mayorA chat with Poland’s first openly gay ‘sołtys’

society

leśniewoLocation: North-central Poland, Pomeranian Voivodeship, Puck County, 11km west of Puck

Population: approx. 1500

Founding: 1432 - first mentioned in historical documents. Then called Mechowo. The village was founded as serf estate for the Cistercian Order.

marcin nikrantBorn: November 22nd, 1985, in Puck

Nikrant won the the village mayor elections on February 13th, 2011. After 18 months of ‘mayoring,’ thanks to his own commitment and to the engagement of the community, the village of Leśniewo placed third in  the ‘Beautiful Village of 2012’ competition, for which they received 1000 PLN from the Puck county authorities.

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BeCAUSe ThiS iS OUr COUNTryPolish cinema in the 2nd half of the 20th century

In Andrzej Wajda’s film ‘Man of Marble’, the bricklayer Birkut goes to vote in 1957 and throws his ballot into the box. He was a Stakhanovite, one of Stalin’s over-achiev-ing super workers whose figures are carved in marble. A reporter asks him why he is voting, seeing as he has been cheated and experienced so much injustice. He replies: because this is our country....

Birkut’s tragedy is that when he wanted to pass himself off as his arrested friend, it turned out that he, the idol, has no power; he is just a figurehead. After that, he rebelled and was sent to prison. He came out in 1956 and in 1970 he died when soldiers fired at protesting workers. In the 1970s, in the same shipyard where Lech Wałęsa worked, his son would go on to set up the free trade union Solidarity. This is the legend of the Polish People’s Republic, portrayed in Wajda’s two films ‘Man of Marble’ and ‘Man of Iron’; films that took away from the authorities the power of the fig-urehead worker. Today their only importance is historical. ‘Man of Marble’ still works, however, as to this day we are left wondering why Birkut voted for the People’s Republic. The film revealed the secret of that regime; that it was to-talitarian, grey and poor, with long queues. Yet when I hear stories about that Poland, I want to say, as Birkut had said: But it was our country, we didn’t have any other. And we would love it even less if not for Polish cinema between 1956-1981, which remains unsurpassed.

The films of Wajda, Munk, Kawalerowicz, Has, Konwicki, Kutz, Polanski and Skolimowski (before these two were forced to emigrate), Różewicz, Morgenstern, Zanussi, Kieślowski, Holland, Marczewski, and the comedies of Bareja, expanded the confines of freedom. In the 1990s when Czesław Bielecki was preparing the ‘Socland’ exhi-

Although all spheres of life were controlled by the Party, it was not an Orwellian world; the system was full of holes, a mass of gated obstacles to get around. This can best be seen in the example of cinema, which was never fully con-trolled by the state. It was funded and censored by the state, but the producers were ‘film teams’, a one-of-a-kind struc-ture created in 1955 during the thaw after Stalin’s death. The teams were a cooperative led by directors and writers and they won the trust of audiences, establishing contact with them over the heads of the authorities. Team leaders, most belonging to the Party, such as Jerzy Bossak or Jerzy Kawalerowicz, showed no deference. Leading Polish screen-writers such as Jerzy Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Konwicki and Kazimierz Brandys gradually moved closer to the opposi-tion. Despite pervasive censorship and periods of increased control and purges, like in 1968, Polish cinema was still in the hands of filmmakers, not politicians. ‘Ashes and Diamonds’ and ‘Man of Marble’ - two films that pushed censorship to the limit (the limit being allegiance to the Soviet Union) - made clear that the existing order was intractable.

‘Ashes and Diamonds’ takes place on the night the World War Two ended. The brilliant and intuitive Zbigniew Cybulski plays the role of Maciek, a war-weary hero who shot Nazis during the occupation, and now has to shoot a communist. He loses faith in the sense of his struggle and seeks a way out of the trap. The young anti-communist is in love with a barmaid, and while kissing her he looks for the magazine of his pistol, when at the same time behind the hotel room wall he hears the steps of the man he has to kill. The communist in the film is also in a trap. The events take place at the same time, convulsively intertwined while Soviet tanks rumble down the street. Drunk people dance the polonaise, welcoming a freedom which is the begin-ning of a new slavery, lies and camouflage. Nowhere else in the cinema of communist countries was the crushing force of history, deceiving a further generation, shown with such drama. The film, which ends with the famous scene of Maciek’s agony as he is shot dead in a junkyard, does not depress but rather acts as an invigorating shock. It was a protest against death, in the name of life.

No equivalent in world cinemaIn the 1960s another perspective came to dominate in Polish cinema – existentialism, showing people taken out of the context of history and politics. Polanski’s brilliant debut ‘Knife in the Water’ takes place inside a car and on a boat, where we see a game played out between two men and a woman involving the laws of nature, competition, sex and power. The excellent ‘Night Train’ by Jerzy Kawalerowicz has elements of film noir, melodrama and thriller. In the film, a train is standing in a field and the passengers - carrying with them their unfulfilled desires and frustrated love - are involved in the pursuit of a criminal. It was as if the killer be-ing chased took upon himself the evil that resided in each

of the passengers. This film - like so many others at the time - did not ask questions about the system, but rather about the nature of man. A film that still brings pleasure, and one that was once considered to be an artistic scan-dal, is Kazimierz Kutz’s youthful masterpiece, ‘Nobody’s Calling’. A boy, similar to Maciek from ‘Ashes and Diamonds’, who after the war did not carry out his orders, flees to the new Western Territories. Kutz’s film removes the hero from history and is a remarkable exploration of first love. The deserted former German town to which a group of settlers from the east arrives becomes a love trance scene, shown in a way that has no equivalent in world cinema.

The film from those years that I go back to most often is ‘The Saragossa Manuscript’ by Wojciech Has, an adapta-tion of the nineteenth-century novel by Jan Potocki, and one of the wildest eccentricities in film history. Nothing really happens in the film; in fact it is really about itself. The adventures of a Spanish officer (Zbigniew Cybulski) travelling through Sierra Morena are a series of trials that aim to convince the doubter of the existence of parallel worlds and the superiority of fiction over reality. The eso-teric film in a sense talks about us, demonstrating how to detach ourselves from reality, finding an outlet in the arts. In the Poland of the time people stood in queues, not just for meat but even for films and books. Cinema fulfilled a role which can be compared to the role of art when Poland was under partition. Cinema led us, educated us and opened our horizons, at times smarter than the audience. My gen-eration grew up with it. In the 1970s, cinema entered a new, final, mature phase. It was a time when the opposition was already manifest, and then later became the mass move-ment Solidarity. Now it was not enough to merely reveal the false reality, which was already visible anyway.

Self knowledge, then silenceThe heroes of the films of Zanussi, Kieślowski and Marczewski were young people starting their lives, find-ing out its limitations and asking basic questions. ‘Camera Buff’ and ‘Blind Chance’ by Kieślowski were reminiscent of ‘Bildungsroman’, a novel about the formation of man. Kieślowski’s ‘Decalogue’ had the same character. ‘Blind Chance’, made in 1981 but not released until five years lat-er, seems to be his most important film, a farewell to the People’s Republic, a departure from the limits of conscious-ness that were imposed under communism. Kieślowski showed three variants of the life of the hero Witek, who is at the same time an activist in a Marxist youth organisation, a dissident Catholic, and finally an apolitical doctor (with only the latter variant being real, the others hypothetical). Social roles and perceptions appear to be the result of chance, with the same honest man able to stand on opposite sides of the barricades. Witek (played by the then rising star of Polish cinema Bogusław Linda) strives for perfection in his life. His quest is told from a higher perspective than the

bition, he asked me to illustrate the exhibition with frag-ments of old Polish films. I realised then that the golden age of cinema, from Munk’s ‘Man on the Tracks’ and Wajda’s ‘Ashes and Diamonds’ (1950s) along with Skolimowski’s ‘Hands Up!’ and Wajda’s ‘Man of Marble’ (1960s/70s) to Kieślowski’s ‘Blind Chance’ and Bugajski’s ‘Interrogation’ (1980s), revealed and described the ruling system. But it also gave something more. It opened the door to the future, and showed a dynamic reality open to change.

Communist ideology after 1956 was dead, although no-body had believed in it anyway, even those in power who had to go to Moscow to explain their actions. They too had to play a double game. Sometimes they took risks, like the Minister of Culture Tejchma, who approved the making of Man of Marble and ended up paying for it with his job. I never met a single person in communist Poland who would say of themselves: I am a communist. That was something sooner heard in France or Italy. Another paradox of the People’s Republic was that the opposition which formed after 1956, created by Jacek Kuroń, Karol Modzelewski and Jan Józef Lipski, was fundamentally left-wing and appealed to socialist ideas. Primate Wyszyński and Cardinal Wojtyła (the future John Paul II)were not far from the left either, hence the alliance of opposition and Church at the time. The process of social emancipation took place within the socialist system. In what other system could workers' trade unions, such as Solidarity, gain such importance?

A protest against deathThe West saw in Poland a Trojan horse among the coun-tries controlled by the Soviet Union. The Russians said that we were the ‘happiest barrack in the socialist camp’.

Tadeusz Sobolewski is one of Poland’s most prominent film critics. He has worked for the magazines

‘Film’ and ‘Kino’, where from 1990 to 94 he was also Editor-in-Chief. He now writes for

‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ and is the co-host of the film program

‘Kocham Kino’ on TVP. He studied Polish philology.

Andrzej Wajda and Robert Więckiewicz, the actor playing former President Lech Wałęsa on set of the biopic film about the legendary 'Solidarity' leader.

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restrictions of the system - from the perspective of the death that awaits him in any of the variants of fate, and also from the perspective of absolute, ultimate fulfilment, full of knowledge.

Polish cinema went full circle and reached a higher level of consciousness. Witek from ‘Blind Chance’ cannot fit into the roles life presents him with. Like his predecessor Maciek from ‘Ashes and Diamonds’, he can’t fit into the roles that history has prepared for him. But Kieślowski doesn’t step over the mark; he knows that the sense of limitation does

not depend on the system and it will pass with it. The story in ‘Blind Chance’ could be told in today’s Poland (or anywhere else in the world). In the first years af-ter 1989, the Polish film industry was in deep crisis; it had lost its meaning and most of the privileges it had gained un-der the previous regime. The watershed in the history of Polish cinema was the introduction of martial law in 1981. In the years of repression, when Polish culture went underground, when demonstrators fought with police on the streets, cinema, which until just before then was the ‘most important of all the arts’, fell silent and withdrew to the sidelines.

Losing its wayIn the new Poland, in the early years of the 1990s, state patronage declined and the former film teams became private companies. Privatised cinemas showed American hits. The old masters of Polish

cinema seemed to be lost - there were no conditions for the emergence of a new generation, a new Polish school or a new cinema of moral anxiety. It was not until after 2000, when a film fund was introduced similiar ot those in Western Europe (especially France), based on taxes paid by TV and cinema viewers, and the establishment of the Polish Film Institute, that cinema became protected and film production increased to about 50 films a year. In the first years after 1989, Polish cinema, trained in resisting communism, was unable to cope with freedom – in fact it was terrified by it. There was no common myth that Polish filmmakers could appeal to, and films in the early 1990s were dominated by dissolution. Jan Jakub Kolski’s magi-cal tale ‘Johnnie Aquarius’ showed the end of illusion, the end of a miracle. The most popular film in the 1990s was Władysław Pasikowski’s police drama ‘Pigs’. Linda, with his noble, classy face, played a security service agent who be-came a police officer. This rogue cinema, a reaction to the marauding reality of the time, had therapeutic relevance: it broke through the barrier produced in the years of martial law, the barrier that separated ‘us’ - the decent part of the nation - from ‘them’ - the bad communists. In Krzysztof Krauze’s ‘The Debt’, the greatest film of the 1990s, decent people become killers. In the film, two thirty-somethings from good Warsaw families take out a loan and end up kill-ing the demonic debt enforcer. It is a film about the devil of capitalism, which places greater temptation in front of young people and enslaves them to greater extent than the system in which previous generations had lived.

If it is possible to talk about a mission of Polish cinema after 1989, it was undertaken by Marek Koterski - the big-gest revelation of those years - in a series of films made

over 30 years brought together by the figure of a hero, the alter ego of the director: ‘The House of Fools’, ‘Inner Life Life’, ‘Ajlawju’, ‘Not Funny’, ‘Day of the Wacko’ and ‘We’re All Christs’. These comedies are based on a perverse for-mula. Koterski tells the audience: look, I’m laughing at my-self, disrobing in front of you. If you find this similar to your experience, don’t be shy, join me, it will be a relief for you. The world around us seems stupid, obnoxious and aggres-sive. But you’re a part of it. You are the same. If you want to change the world, start with yourself.

Suffice it to say that Polish cinema has enjoyed a revival in the last decade; it has regained its audience, often equal to or greater than that for Hollywood blockbust-ers. Can we talk about success? The decade did indeed produce some great directors: Andrzej Jakimowski, Małgorzata Szumowska and Leszek Dawid. However, a large proportion of the 50-60 films made each year are entertainment products, mostly romantic comedies. A separate important trend after 2000, which has al-so attracted audiences, are films about the dark peri-ods of post-war history: the Katyń lie (‘Katyń’ by Wajda), the Stalinist trials where underground anti-Nazi heroes were sentenced to death (‘General Nil’ by Bugajski), the massacre on the coast in 1970 (‘Black Thursday’ by Antoni Krauze), and martial law and the martyrdom of Father Popiełuszko (‘Popiełuszko’ by Wieczyński). These films were illustrative and useful as a teaching tool, but they didn’t enter into a dialogue with the present as the old Polish films from 1956-1981 did. I am thinking of such masterpieces as ‘Kanał’ by Wajda about the Warsaw Uprising, and ‘The Passenger’ by Munk about Auschwitz. Those films posed questions as great literature does, whereas the new films are only chronicles. They say: ‘You have to remember’. But they don’t say why.

There is one director, however, who undertook in his films the old therapeutic task of Polish cinema. He touched on a key problem for Polish culture: the relation to evil that was caused not only by ‘them’: the communists, the Russians, the Germans - but also by ourselves. Our culture, formed in the days of slavery, created the ideal of the motherland that is oppressed by innocence. After 1989, this idealised image had to be destroyed. The director in question is Wojtek Smarzowski, and his last three films, ‘The Wedding’, ‘The Dark House’ and ‘Rose’, are perhaps the most im-portant cinematic achievements of the decade. The war in ‘Rose’ is in the form of sexual violence, carried out in-discriminately by Germans, Russians and Poles. Evil is here divorced from history, ideology and nation; rather it is common and human. It knows no bounds. What  is the difference between rape by Russians or Germans? What is the difference between Polish secret police base-ments and Gestapo torture cells? A former comrade in arms, fighting with Hitler, becomes the executioner of his compatriot after the war. In the film, Poles become the persecutors of Mazuria’s autonomous population. The film reveals that our peaceful life today was built on a founda-tion of rape. That violence is still present in the collective unconscious; it resides in us and may be revealed. But the bloody ballad is also symbolic. A raped woman scorned by those close to her finds a protector, a man who suffered during the war who loves her with the most delicate love. What is interesting is that the film, filled with the most brutal rape scenes, found strong resonance with women. A bloody western turned out to be a melodrama in which love is redemption. by Tadeusz Sobolewski

‘The golden age of Polish cinema, revealed and described the ruling systemBut it also gave something more.it opened the door to the future’

To see the Polish names of the films mentioned, please go to the section

‘magazine’ at poland-today.pl

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Ice is hardly the new ‘in-thing’. It has, after all, been around for mil-lions of years and is even rumoured to have killed off the dinosaurs - it’s that old. Which leads directly to the burning question: Why can it be so difficult to find ice in Poland on a hot summer’s day? That’s a ques-tion Marcin Skłodowski and Maciej Olejniczakowski pondered over about three years ago, and, in a moment of fermented-grape fuelled inspiration, decided to act on their hunch and set up Quickice. They met at elementary school in Warsaw at the age of seven, and were close friends until the end of high school, but then gradually lost contact until, by chance, they found themselves living in the same building in Old Mokotów (Stary Mokotów).

In the meantime Marcin had spent several years in Texas, where the ‘ice culture’, as he terms it, really struck him. Every single gas station, grocery store, camp ground, marina, hotel and beach has a massive ice freezer selling two to five kilo bags of ice, he says. And this is a place where pret-ty well every home has a refrigerator with a built-in ice dispenser, he adds. Okay, but what about the difference in weather between Poland and Texas? Wouldn’t this be a factor when con-sidering bringing ice to the Polish masses? This is true to a certain extent, says Marcin, but the more important reason … is because people dont use ice the same. In the States, he explains, you would never go to the beach or to a ball game without a huge cooler of ice to keep your drinks cool.

So Marcin, an experienced landscape architect, and Maciej, whose back-ground is in TMC (technology, media and communications), started do-ing market research in Poland and soon felt they had found a real niche. There were quite a few companies producing bagged ice, but ice dis-pensing machines had not yet been tried on any significant scale, they claim. So they decided to go for it. We knew…. (there) was a 50/50 chance. Either it was going to be a big hit or a big bust, says Marcin. So far their ma-chines have all been manufactured abroad – they’re only now looking for a manufacturer in Poland. Ice vend-ing machines are actually quite a new concept, even globally, says Maciej. Quickice has made Poland one of the first countries in Europe to have them. Starting a vending machine business from scratch has been perhaps the biggest hurdle for the duo. Trying to introduce a relatively new product in a quite innovative and experimental way has definitely been a challenge. Plus neither of us comes from a man-ufacturing, engineering or exporting background, so everything from get-ting the right health certificates, to hiring contractors, shipping, customs issues, and fixing problems with the machines – even down to the tiny de-tails like finding warehouse space - has had to be figured out very quickly on the job, explains Marcin.

Looking beyond PolandSo how are things going so far? The first phase has been mostly a testing phase, says Maciej. There wasn’t a lot of prec-

edent to follow. After the field test of a few dozen machines across the Polish coast and the (Mazury) lake district this summer, we have enough market feed-back to give some final tweaks to our machines and start mass production. Being proud of their country, and for a multitude of other reasons, they would like the machines to be 100% ‘Made in Poland.’ We’re currently in talks with producers here to make this happen. Knock on wood, it will, hopes Maciej.

Marcin and Maciej’s ambitions are not confined to the borders of Poland. Where do we not hope to export our machines to, they exclaim almost in unison. The potential for growth is pretty fantastic, claims Maciej, men-tioning Europe, the Middle East, Africa, even the US and South America. Right now, though, they remain fo-cused on Poland.

Our short-term goal is to place a few hundred machines on the Polish mar-ket within the next year or so, says Marcin. The demand, they believe, is out there. We had our machines at almost every marina in Mazury this summer. Sales of bagged ice… in the few stores nearby that still sold ice, slowed a bit, but still stayed decent, while our sales went through the roof. And there weren’t more sailors on the lakes than in the previous years. So far they have used their own funds and taken out loans. Now they’re looking for serious investors. If anyone’s in-terested in becoming an ice baron… by Richard Stephens

The meaning of iceCan frozen water become red hot in Poland?

POLAnD TODAy will profile a new Polish start up every month, as well as giving them space for an advert opposite the article for free, as part of our commitment to supporting entrepreneurship in Poland. If you would like us to consider your company for a profile, or you know of a company you think should be considered, please contact us through www.poland-today.pl

staRt up

Marcin Skłodowski and Maciej Olejniczakowski want to bring ice into people's lives in Poland

54 55spoRtspoRt

The Polish sporting complexTomasz Zimoch, one of Poland’s most well known sports commentators, gives his views on a landmark summer in the country’s sporting annals

when you think about the year 2012 and Polish sports, what springs to mind first?

I think that we hosted a great event, the European Football Championship. It was something very special. And what matters most today is not who lost or won, but that we organ-ized a world-class event. We proved that sports can unite and entertain, and I believe we managed to look at the world from a different perspec-tive. Everyone thought we were bound to fail. There were voices saying that we wouldn’t manage to build the sta-diums, and that it would be a logisti-cal fiasco on our part. As it turned out, everything is possible, and when I recall other football events that I have been to I’m positive that we have nothing to be ashamed of. The Euro tournament captivated the entire nation, inspired all of us. It wasn’t an event only for foot-ball hooligans, but also for all the intel-lectuals, who considered them a threat. What’s also relevant is that we hosted the Irish. They showed us what a joyful and emotional experience sport can be and how one can identify with the team, not only when it’s winning. We should consider what to do in order no to let that lesson go to waste.

what do you believe needs to be improved so that we can do better, to avoid any disappoint-ments and national discussions about yet another failure?

Disappointment is perhaps, in a way, our inferiority complex. But then what should the Swiss say? I mean, they are a rich country, but in general they’re not very successful in sports. They have Federer and a few oth-ers, but they’re not a decisive force. And what about other fields, can we be considered a power in any of them? Why don’t we win Nobel Prizes? Or Oscars? Why don’t we succeed in other areas, yet demand success from athletes or our football players? If we continue to look at sport from this point of view, we’ll miss what’s most important about it.

And which game of the tourna-ment did you enjoy the most? I don’t think that there was a single boring or ‘bad’ game. There were well-played passes, goals, great individual plays and also a wonderful atmos-phere in the stadiums, and that is an integral part of the show. Each game was one of a kind, so I won’t even try to classify them.

Apart from euro 2012, the Olympic games in london were also held this year. what was the greatest mo-ment of the games in your opinion?

The Olympics for sure didn’t lack beautiful moments. As for the Poles, we definitely found that we are not in the lead when it comes to world sports, and it will probably take time before things get any better. But we won 10 medals, so there’s no need to despair. If we consider that the competition now is fiercer, the re-sult from London can be regarded as one of our best. Our volleyball team was dubbed champions even before they went to the Olympics, but as it turned out that they weren’t able to handle the pressure. And hats off to Tomasz Majewski, who proved to be ready for the competition and learned from his mistakes at the last World Championships. Defending a title is truly a great feat. Moreover, he’s very intelligent, a philosopher of Polish sports, so to speak. There were many others medalists whose stories deserve recognition and men-tioning. Among them Zosia Klepacka, a woman with an incredible story, who fought for a medal not only for herself, but also in order to sell it and

help her neighbour’s sick daughter financially. There were many unex-pected outcomes, but I guess sur-prise is also an essential element of Polish sports. I was convinced that we would leave with two gold med-als in weightlifting. It seemed that Marcin Dołęga had the gold in his pocket, but in the most decisive mo-ment, weights that he could normally lift with one arm turned out too be too heavy. From a Pole’s perspective, the last Olympic Games certainly left us with a sense of yearning.

you mentioned the ‘arms race’. i share your view that competition in sports is getting tougher, however i feel that for a country like Poland, with over 30 million people, 10 medals is simply not enough. what’s the reason for this?

Of course I would rather see us hav-ing more medals, but then again I have to ask, how many would be enough?

Somewhere between 15 or 20 could be considered satisfactory.

I don’t want to look for an explana-tion and I don’t have a remedy for the issue. If I had one I would be work-ing in a different field. But how many medals did the Austrians, Swedes,

Norwegians, or the Swiss win? Isn’t their attitude and approach to sports better than ours? Of course it is. What’s more, their financial resources are far greater. But they came home with fewer medals than we did. On the other hand take the Hungarians, who are struggling with a crisis and yet among their medals are eight golds. It’s not easy to say what satisfies us, but still we need to ask ourselves whether we are capable of being bet-ter and doing more? Do we have that many athletes and prospective front-runners? We could add Dołęga, the volleyball team, Konrad Czerniak and Radosław Kawęcki to the equation and we would have more medals, but would that really change the reality of Polish sports? All of this is extremely complex. It takes years of preparation and huge financial resources among other things. But more importantly, sport is supposed to teach and build character. U nfortunately nowadays it’s a lot harder to find artists or true fighters.

what would be a good direction for Polish sports? we are currently investing in every sport possible, even in those disciplines where the chances for winning medals are slim to none. Perhaps we should follow the footsteps of the hungarians, or the Swedes before them, and con-centrate on specific disciplines?

That’s a very tough question. It’s a bit similar to business, you need to de-cide where to put your money. If we bet on specific sports we might pre-clude other individuals from becom-ing successful in the remaining disci-plines. Polish sports leave a lot to wish for. However, I suppose there might be a solution. The funds that we have at our disposal are being spent on many things, and if we add them up, it will turn out that there is far more money than we initially thought. Tell me (...) in which discipline did the British win the most medals?

when it comes to the organization, the euro was indeed a success, but how would you assess the perform-ance of Franciszek Smuda’s team?

I have shed the popular Polish belief that we are a football ‘power’. We still think that we should dominate and that we have the resources and the people to do it, but the truth is that we don’t. We need to realize that sport is like an arms race. The political forces of the world have shifted and it’s getting harder to compete. All in all, I’m not dis-appointed. Although deep in my heart I believed in our national team, I knew that we could not succeed - we are not like Spain, we don’t have great individ-ual players, our power lies in the team. When something fails, physical prepa-ration, for instance, things go awry, es-pecially if you add pressure to the mix. The team played before their own fans, the players aren’t all on ‘big’ club teams and they don’t often get the chance to participate in such important matches. It’s not a matter of bad choices or se-lections, because we could have used only two, maybe three more good play-ers, if any. I suggest we stop looking at sport in terms of 'we must' do this or that. I have no idea where our expecta-tions of playing in the final come from.

‘i guess surprise is an essential element of Polish sports’

Photo caption sera natem apienia ident utemque sa perume ium, tecepeliam haruptaquam arum que vidigenditi ulpa volupta tiorit officab oreperum hilit abor-pore ra sim

Photo caption sera natem apienia ident utemque sa perume ium, tecepeliam haruptaquam arum que vidigenditi ulpa volupta tiorit officab oreperum hilit abor-pore ra sim

not even a breathtaking goal from captain Jakub Błaszczykowski could ensure victory for Po-land against Russia

Tomasz Majewski, after winning the gold medal and defending his title at the London Olympic Games.

The Polish Olympic team enters the Olympic stadium in London. They were to win 10 medals.

tomasz zimochTomasz Zimoch is a Polish sports journalist and commentator. He has worked for Polskie Radio for several years and in 2010 he was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit by President Lech Kaczyński for his work in journalism and for promoting a physical culture and the Olympic ideal.

56spoRt

Cycling… Exactly. Wiggins won the road

race, but all in all the Brits dominated mainly on the (cycling) track. They know that it is a sport that generates medals, that it pays to compete in. They are aware of the fact that suc-cess is achieved not only by the ath-letes, but also thanks to the coaches, medicine and logistics. I’m impressed with how they monitor sports. Some of their medalists started out in en-tirely different disciplines. This hardly ever happens in Poland. It’s possible that some athletes who never had a shot at winning a medal in their own sport could fight for a chance to be on the podium in a different field. I suppose there are things that we need to change, such as reducing bu-reaucracy, working more and harder,

then again luck is an essential element of sports. The upcoming months will be challenging for her, as she will have to prove that her success wasn’t merely a one-off.

what are you looking forward to most in the year ahead?

I like sports in general, so I’m look-ing forward to many competitions. I would like to see our football team playing better and some great ten-nis tournaments, and I’m also count-ing on the World Ski Championships in Val di Fiemme, Italy. I used to an-ticipate specific events, but now I realize that everything about sport is beautiful and unpredictable. Even when the competitors aren’t fighting for a championship ti-tle, those events can be more ex-citing than the blockbuster games. After all, sometimes a lower league match can be more riveting than a game between the big names in football. interview by Jakub Markiewicz

Markiewicz is a 2nd-year studentin law and finance at the Koźmiński University in Warsaw.

having more respect for the coach-es and being less jealous of others. Or maybe we should simply be more consistent in our actions, just like the British. Although I’m not so sure that the years ahead will be as fruitful for them as one might expect.

2012 is also the year of Agnieszka radwańska’s fantastic performance at wimbledon (she was runner up in the women’s single final – ed.). was it a performance that reflects her true place in women’s tennis?

We could analyze the performance of any athlete in this aspect. In wom-en’s tennis the competition is now lev-eled. Any of the 30 best players could be in a Grand Slam final. I dare not say that she didn’t deserve to be in the final, however she was lucky, but

Agnieszka Radwańska and Ser-ena Williams pose for photos with trophies during the awarding ceremony for the final of womens singles at the Wimbledon ten-nis Championships in London, Britain

Sylwia Bogacka won the silver medal in the women's 10 m air rifle competition in London, her 3rd Olympic Games

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58 The city that almost bled to death

Gerhard Gnauck has been Warsaw correspondent for Die Welt since 1999. Prior to that he was a CEE editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for three years. He holds a PhD in Politi-cal Science from Freie Universität Berlin.

The City of Warsaw has emerged as a modern European capital, with a high-rise downtown and all the trappings

Warsaw Water Filters, designed by William Lind-ley, completed in 1886. The historical waterworks, after renovations, serve the capital to this day.

The Pac-Radziwiłł Palace on Miodowa Street was rebuilt in 1825 according to a design by Henryk Marconi.

The PAST building was constructed in the early 20th century for a Swedish-owned telephone company and was the tallest building at the time. It became an iconic building during the Warsaw Uprising, see-ing some of the most vicious fighting

A Jewish market. The Jewish com-munity grew steadily until it became the 2nd biggest in the world after New YorkBut Warsaw recovered and attitudes to the city, amongst both

inhabitants and visitors, are changing

histoRy

the so-called Saxon (‘Saski’) Gardens on the site of the former Saxon Palace, to remember them by. The palace, however, was destroyed by later German rulers and so-called ‘Saxon Axis’ is no more to be seen. There are not many traces of German culture around any more.

In the 19th century, when European cities started to resemble their present incarnations, the names Starynkiewicz and Lindley stand out. Sokrates Starynkiewicz, a Russian general, was the Mayor of Warsaw from 1875 – 1892. Politically it was a dark age: Warsaw was just one of many provincial gar-rison towns in the Tsar’s empire. But Mayor Starynkiewicz initiated a great period of urban development. Many parks and green spaces, including Ujazdowski Park, were designed and built. A modern sewage system was created, modern gas street lighting was introduced and the first telephone lines were laid. The English engineers William Lindley (Senior) and William Heerlein Lindley (Junior) were to thank for the sewers. The telephone system, started in 1881 – only six years after the telephone was invented - came from US company International Bell. Not long afterwards the network was

taken over by a Swedish firm. To put it succinctly: Warsaw was a provincial city in the Russian empire, but it was a modern cosmopolitan one. Naturally, I was interested in how many Germans lived in the city. The statistics throw light on this. There was a census in the year 1897 which counted 11,317 people who declared German to be their mother tongue. Larger groups consist-ed of ethnic Poles (421,569), Jews who spoke Yiddish (185,077), and Russians and other East Europeans (59,763, three quarters of whom were men – to a large extent soldiers and civil serv-ants). Germans did not play a big role in Warsaw at that time. Later, of course, it was all very different. After Hitler’s troops occupied the city, German archi-tects started making plans for Warsaw to become a ‘new German town’ in which a ‘Hall of the People’, crowned with a lofty dome, would replace the Royal Castle. The occupying forces de-stroyed the castle but they did not get round to building anything.

Not the cosiest place in the worldWhat about the last two decades? There are quite a number of buildings, including high-rise hotel buildings and

office blocks, since 1989 which have been designed by foreign architects. The best known are Norman Foster and Daniel Libeskind, the latter having created a sail-shaped high-rise apart-ment block which will soon be even taller than the Stalin-era Palace of Culture. By comparison German archi-tects have kept very much in the back-ground, with one notable exception: the National Stadium, where the June 2012 European Football Championship was held). Interestingly, even a new architectural city guide published in German, entitled ‘Warsaw – Phoenix from the Ashes’, was written by a Swiss architectural expert, Werner Huber.

So it is not very easy to be German living in Warsaw. Sometimes I resort to the words of a German author who wrote: ‘Beautiful cities are boring;

What is life like in Warsaw? Did you actually choose to go to Poland? Foreigners who live in Poland’s capi-tal city are familiar with these ques-tions. I came to Poland from Germany, and for a long time Poland’s reputa-tion among Germans was not very good, even though - or perhaps be-cause - the two countries are direct neighbours. However, the relationship in reverse was even more problematic.

It is certainly a challenge to be a German living in Poland. In many re-gions you encounter the legacy of a long common history. Wit Stwosz (Veit Stoß in German), who was a great medieval artist from Nuremberg, lived in Kraków, for example. In Łódź you often come across traces of German textile manufacturers. And in Silesia, Masury, Gdańsk, Pomerania – in other

ugly cities are beautiful’. Warsaw can never again be as it was. This city is not a cosy place to be in, not even for Poles. It is certainly not cosy for the Germans. However, a popular caba-ret artist and TV personality called Steffen Möller has helped to improve the situation somewhat. He too came to Poland from Germany. He has learnt good Polish and has become popular here. He has observed a lack of ‘local patriotism’ among Warsaw’s inhabit-ants, even a strange sado-masochism, towards the city. The good thing about this sado-masochism is that it makes it easier for newcomers (and there are many of those in Warsaw) to feel at home here. As for me, there is some-one who has linked my life with the life of Warsaw in a special way: my Polish grandfather. During the war he was active in the Resistance Movement, fighting the occupiers. I often pass by one significant place in his life history

– the street corner where, on hearing the words ‘Hands up’, he became a German prisoner of war in September 1944. But that is another story.

As I have said, it’s not a cosy place. However, people in the street have become friendlier in recent years. The post-socialist mixture of grumpi-ness and distrust is disappearing. Young people have begun to identi-fy with their city. Warsaw is exciting. Tiring, and yet stimulating. Today it can be described in the same way that Berlin was at the beginning of the 20th century. It is a city which is continually evolving and which is never just ‘be-ing’. Warsaw will no doubt continue to surprise us in many ways. by Gerhard Gnauck

words, in the former eastern territo-ries of Germany - the German travel-ler enjoys the pleasant feeling that his countrymen once built things there. Yet we were responsible for much de-struction in other parts of the coun-try. It is particularly complicated living as a German in Warsaw. Quite simply the Second World War, the occupa-tion and the Holocaust left a more tragic mark on this city than on any other European capital city. Between 1939 and 1945 Warsaw lost more in-habitants than all of France. Decades passed before the population once again reached the 1.3 million mark of the pre-war years.

A dash of Italian styleForeign nations have dominated the modern history of Warsaw, but which foreign influences helped create the city? I have done some research and discovered a few names. At the time of the Polish kings (up to 1795) many of the master builders were Italian: Corazzi, Marconi, Castelli and Chiaveri, to name the most prominent. There was a ‘Saxon’ influence - two Saxon kings, August II and August III, ruled Poland for altogether more than sixty years. Today there is still a small park,

warsawLocated 260 kilometres from the Baltic Sea, 516 kilometres from Berlin and 1152 kilometres from Moscow. Around 1,710,000 inhabitants live in the Greater Warsaw area. It is located in the heartland of the Masovian Plain, with an average elevation of 100 metres above sea level. There are 18 districts in the city. As of 2011, 8,3 million tourists visited Warsaw, there are 63 museums, 76 parks, 28 cinemas, 56 theaters and musical establishments, 24 tram lines, 249 bus lines, 275 km of bike trails, and an unbelievable 3288 rooms inside the Palace of Culture and Science

‘Foreign nations have dominated the modern history of warsaw’

‘it is a city which is continually evolving and which is never just ‘being’

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It happened in... OctoberWarsaw, October 1956. Worker’s rally at the Ursus tractor factory

Communist Poland saw many worker’s protests in 1956. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the USSR started releasing the tight grip it had on its satellite countries. In February 1956, on the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech criticizing Stalin and the ‘cult of the individual’ which had a huge im-pact on both the internal politics in the Soviet Union and among the satellites, which saw it as an opportunity to find their own way of realizing socialist premises. Poland started looking at the shortcomings and failures of socialism in the country, with the authorities allowing some freedom of speech. While the intellectuals were engaged in discussion and criticizing the system, the workers’ situation was bad, and not getting any better. In what is called the ‘Poznań June’ events, workers in Poznań organized a general strike which was pacified by 10,000 soldiers and resulted in 70 deaths. The strike amplified and accelerated the process of democratic and economic reform and in October 1956, after a period of political and social turmoil, a new genera-tion of Communists came to power, headed by Władysław Gomułka. While Poland had a relatively peaceful regime change, in what is called the ‘October Thaw,’ Hungary, an-other USSR satellite had a full-on revolution, brutally paci-fied by the Soviet army. Back in Poland, the spirit of liberal reform that Gomułka introduced, however, was short-lived, and the regime went back to being as oppressive and stag-nant as ever just a year later. by Hanna Kozłowska

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62 63Surowe Suwałki12 international chefs cooking in the wilds

Food Food

* ‘surowe’ meansraw in Polish

We had to build a couple of kitchens in the middle of nowhere – the nearest place was about 20 miles away. It was logistically demanding. But the land-scape was stunningly beautiful and the raw materials were interesting. So said Alessandro Porcelli, the founder, organ-izer and all-round inspiration of Cook it raw, speaking on the phone with Poland Today. ‘What’s Raw?’, as their website asks. Well, it’s not like anything else, so it’s not easy to define. It’s a col-lection of renowned avant-garde chefs from around the globe meeting more or less once a year in an inspirational lo-cation to harvest – in its broader sense

– the earth’s natural culinary resources. The place: Suwałki in northeast Poland. The locals had a different perspec-tive on time. Everything was ‘maybe’

– it was very charming, like a forgot-ten land – stunning! enthused Porcelli. Underlying it all, the building of bridg-es between cultures while interacting with the local community is imperative. At the end of the field-trip (for want of a better word) the chefs individually produce their own ‘ode to the coun-try’, as Porcelli put it, each adding their own unique twist. The chef from New Zealand (Ben Shawry) dug a hole in the ground, put in two piglets and pump-

kins, covered them, built a huge fire over the hole, then collapsed the fire into it and covered it with wood and towels – basically a hangi. The dinner that night, with everyone’s creations, was amazing. Government ministries routinely take a lot of flak, so credit where credit’s due. Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture was ex-tremely supportive, particularly Darek (Dariusz Goszczyński), their head of communications. I talk with a lot of governments and it’s not always easy, but dealing with them was a nice experience. They do a great job of promoting the country through gas-tronomy. Poland is already developing its marketing-through-food concept. It looks like they’re on to a good thing. by Richard Stephens

suwałkiLocated in north-eastern Poland, close to the Lithuanian border. Population of 70,000

Close to Suwałki is Lake Hańcza, Poland’s deepest lake, at a maximum depth of 108.5 m. The town’s most famous son is Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda, who was born there in 1926.

The chefs were surrounded by stunning nature and the freshest of natural ingredients, the best that Suwalki had to offer. They fished, hunted, explored, picked and collected the food that would make up their final evening dish

The Polish repre-sentative, Wojciech Modest Amaro, has received a Michelin Rising Star for his atelier Amaro restau-rant in Warsaw.

Pascal Barbot from France opened his restaurant As-trance in July 2000 and only one year later had a Michelin star, the youngest res-taurant ever to receive one. The restaurant in Paris now has 3 stars.

The only woman amongst the group was Ana Ros, whose restaurant is in Ko-barid in the Slovenian countryside

cook it rawCook it Raw kicked off in Copenhagen in 2009 and has since taken place in the Friulian vineyards of Collio, the Finnish wilderness of Lapland (2010) and the ancient city of Ishikawa, Japan (2011),

Cook it Raw Poland took place from 25th – 30th August near the town of Suwałki

The 12 participating chefs were:

Albert Adrià (Spain), Inaki Aizpitarte (France), Modest Wojciech Amaro (Poland), Pascal Barbot (France), Claude Bosi (UK), Kobe Desramaults (Belgium), Alexandre Gauthier (France), Magnus nilsson (Sweden), Daniel Patterson (USA), Ana Rôs (Slovenia), René Redzepi (Denmark),Ben Shewry (Australia)

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Our car dashed past the first sign for Sandomierz not long after cross-ing Warsaw city limits. The rather bat-tered metal plate told us that we had only another 176 kilometres to go be-fore we arrived at our final destina-tion. As a place to go in Poland, the little town of Sandomierz, population c. 25,000, appears somewhat pushed off the beaten track. Big places such as Gdańsk and Krakow, understanda-bly perhaps, hog the top of the league but even when it comes to Poland’s smaller attractions Sandomierz is not often found on a must-see list.

This is a shame as the town, or the old town at least, is a little beau-ty. Plonked on a hill overlooking the Vistula River and boasting a street layout almost unchanged since the 14th century, it comes with dozens of historic and beautiful buildings, eve-rything enveloped in an atmosphere of restful charm. Sandomierz is al-so reasonably close to Warsaw and that makes for an un-taxing drive. The road heads almost due south from the capital, cutting through or-chard after orchard as it makes its way through the heartlands of Polish fruit farming. Dusty town towns lined with ugly, post-war building like Góra Kalwaria and Kozienice slide slowly by and thankfully do little to detain or de-lay you on the journey south.

Not kitsch, periodWhile the countryside was quiet and relaxing the same could not be said about the road. Consisting of bad-ly patched potholes and little else it shook our little Skoda to its springs and forced me to weave an alarming path

that swept up this hill, we approached our hotel, which stood in the shadow of the old town. We had elected to stay at the three-star Hotel Sarmata, not because anybody had recommended it but because it had good reviews on the internet and the prices seemed reasonable to someone like me who dislikes parting with money. The Sarmata turned out to be great choice. It had the looks and feel of a 19th cen-tury manor with period furniture and paintings of long-dead aristocrats. Normally I’m not a great fan of the ol-de-worlde look as too often it slides into the kitsch world of stuffed animals with awkward expressions and tacky ‘antique’ clocks made by the truck load in China. But in this case it worked. All was tasteful, the rooms spacious and spotless, and everything coated

in a delicate bygone charm. In a nod to the modern world, however, our room came with a flat-screen television the size of a billiard table, and free internet.

Just a bit up the hill and round the corner from the hotel stands the Opatów Gate. 33-metres tall, made of brick and dating back to the 14th century, it makes an impressive en-trance to the old town. In the past there were four such gates but now only one survives, maintaining a lonely vigil over the town. It also provides a grand view. I bought a ticket from a joyless old lady who looked as if she last smiled around 1972, and did my best to bound up the innumerable flights of stairs to the top. Once there I had the old town laid out before me in a criss-cross of cobbled streets, and all dominated by the town hall and its white, octagonal clock tower. The old-est building on the square, the town hall was built not long after a raid by pesky Lithuanians in 1349 although in the following centuries it was re-shaped and rebuilt until it reached its present incarnation. It sits in the mid-dle of an oddly slopping square lined by attractive buildings. Most, if not all, have been converted into shops or res-taurants. Many of the shops sold tour-ist bric-a-brac with an emphasis on knightly escapades. Wooden swords, wooden shields, imitation cross bows and plastic helmets - all for children I presume - made up a large section of the retail offer in the shops, reflecting the town’s glory years centuries ago when it was a ‘royal’ settlement and no doubt knights rode around rescuing damsels in distress, slaying dragons and rarely washing.

Sandomierz markets its knightly past, calling itself a Royal Town, and you are never far from big swords and the sound of clanking armour. Off a side street we found a man in full ar-mour, quietly cooking in the hot sum-mer sun and selling tickets to a mu-seum full of helmets, swords and other bladed instruments designed to re-move your extremities. The museum itself was not exactly riveting but the man was kind, letting the children go in for free and then allowing himself to be attacked by wooden-sword wield-ing six-year old.

Later that day we had a rather av-erage pizza on a small square off the main one, and absorbed the atmos-phere. Children played in a fountain, church bells tolled and the sound of wedding songs made their way

around the more sinister holes. But at the village of Kostusin the pothole patchwork gave way to a strip of fresh and unblemished tarmac that darted over low hills and twisted through for-ests with lithe vigour, and it was this that bore us into Sandomierz. The small old town sits apart from the more modern section on its hill, and, turning right near the river onto a road

Matthew Day cov-ers Central Europe for the UK’s The Telegraph, while also writing on Central and Eastern European affairs for the Scots-man. He has reported on major events such as the 2010 Smolensk disaster and Poland’s recent presidency of the EU. He first came to Central Europe in 1992 as an English and history teacher.

A family weekend break in Sandomierz via a park full of dinosaurs

Clanking armour on cobbled streets

sandomierzLocated in south-eastern Poland Population of just over 25,000

In the early 12th century the chronicler Gallus Anonymus ranked it together with Krakow and Wroclaw as one of the main cities of Poland In 1809 the city was damaged during fighting between the forces of Austria and the Duchy of Warsaw during the Napoleonic Wars

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The Cathedral Basilica was built from 1360 to 1680. Sandomierz has around 120 historical buildings from differ-ent periods.

Dusk falls on the charming streets of the Old Town.

Sandomierz’s underground tunnel system. This brick-lined corridor runs under the Old Town market square.

The Gothic Opatów Gate was funded by King Casimir the Great. It used to be one of four gates leading to the city.

not every town can boast a town hall from the 14th century.

66 through the thick heat of the sum-mer evening. Surrounded by beauti-ful buildings but without the throngs of people you would expect of such a place, Sandomierz’s relaxing charm wafted over us. It was a good place to be.

Soup to clear the sinusesBut when you have children in tow, charm and old buildings have only limited appeal so we set out the next day to the small village of Bałtów (pronounced ‘bautoof’), the home of JuraPark, and, consequently, an aw-ful of lot of plastic dinosaurs and fair-ground attractions.

Getting to JuraPark involved re-tracing our route from the day before, turning left just short of Kostusin and heading into a river valley. Off the main road we were immediately in a world of scruffy farms and solitary grazing animals. Every now and then we whizzed by an old person sitting by the road on a bench, and no doubt gave them something to talk about over dinner. Further into the country the valley narrowed, the now-confined river picked up force and then we were in Bałtów. The main buildings of the complex consist of an attractive red-brick water mill but the park spreads across acres and even includes a short ski slope. To be honest, as I paid the 55 zł for a family ticket to see the di-nosaurs, I wasn’t really looking forward to it. I had in mind cheap and tacky dinosaur models, looking like they had fallen out of a giant Christmas cracker, but my fears were misplaced. The di-nosaur trail was well laid out in land-scaped gardens, the models were life-

and passages that were once used to store vital supplies. Now most of them are open to the public, and the tourist route covers 470 metres and 34 cham-bers. After a while one tunnel looks pretty much like another but you have to admire the skill and effort that went into excavating the warren, and also the tunnels provided a respite from the searing heat of the day. Once we sur-faced, mole-like and blinking into the sun, we headed to a pleasant Italian place called Wino Kawarnia De-Gusto (ul. Sokolnickiego 1, for those who are interested) for a very tasty plate of pasta before roaming across the square, down a slight hill and then up another to Sandomierz Castle.

There has been a castle on the same hill overlooking the Vistula for centu-ries despite serious attempts by in-vaders to erase it. In 1656 the Swedes, perhaps honing the minimalist interi-or design skills that they would later use to conquer the home-furnishing world, blew the place sky high, leav-ing only bits left standing. That is how it remained for a long time until it was rebuilt between 1960 and 1986. The handsome castle now houses the re-gional museum and appears to have become a favourite spot for couples to have their wedding pictures taken. We had an ice cream, looked at a couple of collections of interesting junk on sale, and then it was time to head home. Going back to the Sarmata, we piled into the car, turned left down the hill and in a flash Sandomierz was nothing more than an image in my rear-view mirror. But as drove away we were happy that we had made the effort to visit the town. by Matthew Day

sized and looked the part, and both my kids had a whale of a time.

Back in Sandomierz later that day we had dinner at the hotel restaurant. The menu was short and to the point, and the food was excellent consid-ering nothing cost more than 40 zł. I had a wonderful horseradish soup that made your sinuses tingle slightly but was not overpowering, followed by chicken with vegetables. The meat was moist and the cook had not gone down the traditional route of boiling vegetables to the point you can eat them with a spoon, and had instead kept them slightly firm and full of flavour. Having spent a restful night on a stomach full of good food, the next day we took a trip into the un-derworld. Beneath the foundations of Sandomierz lies a labyrinth of tunnels

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‘in 1656 the Swedes, perhaps honing the minimalist interior design skills that they would later use to conquer the home-furnishing world, blew the place sky high’

The ravine of Queen Jadwiga in the southwestern part of Sandomierz.

The dinosaur and fun park at Bałtów has be-come, from nothing only a few years ago, a real attraction, bringing visitors from across Poland

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random facts about kissing:

Philematolegy is the science of kissing. The lips are one of the most sensitive parts of the body – they are almost 100 times more sensitive than even the tips of the fingers. Kissing at the end of a wedding ceremony actu-ally comes from a tradition in ancient Rome, where a kiss was used to sign a contract. A cheek kiss only involves two facial muscles, whereas a deep kiss involves 34. Ancient Roman author Pliny once wrote that kissing a donkey’s nostril would cure the common cold. (Not recommended by Poland Today…)

already mastered the polish greeting?

Here’s how to say hello in other countries. Japan: People here usually bow to each other – this can range from a simple nod of the head to a full-on 90 degree bend at the waist. Middle Eastern countries: Men generally shake hands, though less firmly and for a longer time than in the west. Physical contact for greetings between men and women is generally a no-no. Belgium: Handshakes are always a good way to start – but once you get to know someone, three cheek kisses starting on the left are the way to go. Unless you’re both men. Then you still just shake hands. Kenya: When greeting an elder, grasp their right wrist with your left hand when shaking hands – it’s a sign of respect. Argentina: Handshakes are the best way to greet someone that you’re meeting for the first time, but after that, cheek kisses are the way to go when greeting and departing.

Ah, the Polish greeting. It looks so fa-miliar and natural that you think you should have it nailed – and then you find your face hanging in the air, lips fully puckered as your friend has al-ready moved onto the next person. Hello, awkward.

Having lived and worked in Poland for nearly four years now (with a Polish husband and all), I’m a lit-tle ashamed to admit that at times I still get thrown off by its intricacies. You see, we Americans shake hands. When we meet really good friends, we hug (a big no-no invasion of per-sonal space here in Poland!). While cheek kissing is gaining in popularity in the US, it still holds a bit of a nov-elty status – something reserved for days when you and your friends are feeling particularly ‘Sex and the City’. In Poland, the cheek kiss is an inte-gral part of friendly interaction. Poles pride themselves on their savoir-vivre, and the Polish greeting comes as part and parcel. Unfortunately, what seems so simple an act to Poles is ac-tually much more complex than one would expect. Here, we are going to try to unravel the mystery.

The good old handshakeWhen meeting someone for the first time or in formal situations, a hand-shake and a ‘dzień dobry’ (‘good day’) are standard. Of course, this depends on the age, gender and relative position of the people meet-ing. On occasion, an older Polish man meeting a woman might perform the dying tradition of the hand kiss (more on this in a moment.) It’s not the norm anymore, so if this happens just go with it and smile. In business, a good handshake is always the best option. If you eventually get to know your colleagues or even your clients really well, you might decide to move onto the kisses in less formal set-tings. This will rarely, if ever, happen in the office. In social settings, Poles will tell you that three kisses are the rule. However for a myriad of rea-sons, it is quite often only one. This

depends on the situation, the person, the setting, the weather…. Sometimes it means I know you so well, we can skip formalities or It’s my party, and I would never get to actually talk to anyone if I gave everyone three kisses. Yes, unfortunately it could also mean, I don’t really like you, but I’m doing this to be polite.

It's instinctive, kotkuAlas, there are no real rules defining one or three kisses. Poles just seem to instinctively know. Having such instincts also means that they can-not actually explain this to others. After quizzing a multitude of Poles with this burning question, the only answer that I have come away with is that ‘you just know’. I, and I sus-pect the majority of foreigners, un-fortunately do not ever seem to ‘just know’, which leads to many awk-ward moments. Also of note is that in all situations, men generally only shake each other’s hands - unless a whole lot of alcohol is involved. As to the actual kiss, aim for the other person’s right cheek first, and don’t actually put your lips on the person’s cheek. Also, don’t smack so loud-ly that you blow out their eardrums

– it’s really more of a symbolic kiss than an actual one.

Hand kissing is an old-school tradi-tion and a quickly fading one. It was the height of Polish savoir-vivre for older generations. Today it serves mostly as an overt display of respect (or charming flirtation) from men to women. You will probably only see it on occasion – mostly initiated by older men. Don’t expect it – and men, unless you hail from the aristocracy, it’s best to leave this tradition alone. Baffling as it all seems, the bright side of this is that Poles generally realize how confusing their greeting rules can be to foreigners and are quick to either forget or ignore any mis-steps. Unless, of course, you try to kiss the lady in the immigration office. She might not forget. by Cynthia naugher Skłodowski

Pucker up: one kiss or three?

Cynthia naugher Skłodowski,a Texas native, has lived in Poland for four years with her Polish husband and young son. Her career so far has included stints in NYC at both Cosmopolitan and Seventeen magazines, as well as for a Dallas advertising firm, and she is now con-centrating on trying to get the hang of Polish life and culture, which is a full-time job in itself.

Negotiating the intricacies of meeting & greeting Polish style

The 1970s. An old-fashioned hand kiss at, ironically, a meeting of the National Women’s Council and Women’s League.

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Applauding the captain once the plane touches down on the run-way. Paying for ‘public’ restrooms. In those restrooms a triangle to sig-nify the men’s room and a circle for the women’s. There are many Polish ways or customs that foreigners find strange. But none compare to the shock experienced by non-Poles by the simple act of turning on Polish TV. Say you want to watch the alcohol-drenched, cigarette-smoke-infused, well-dressed world of ‘Mad Men,’ you will hear the faint voice of Jon Hamm or January Jones, but they will be largely overpowered by the voice of Tomasz Knapik, one of the select few men who read all the lines to foreign films on Polish TV. Knapik is actually best known in Poland for his narration of ‘Walker, Texas Ranger,’ so when you see the beautiful January Jones, her ‘voice’ makes you think of Chuck Norris in a cowboy hat. This technique, a doc-umentary-like voice-over which makes all non-Polish films or TV shows, be it ‘Downton Abbey’ or ‘Game of Thrones,’ sound surprisingly similar to each oth-er, is called a ‘lektor’ (‘reader’) transla-tion. The voice-over does not vary his tone or range along with the actors on the screen, he just barely changes his intonation to hint that another charac-ter is speaking, summarizing the con-tent of his or her line.

I was definitely puzzled and amused by the lektor when I first moved here, said Michael Andrusco, a legal proof-reader from Canada. In order to understand what he was watch-ing, he would turn up the volume really high, hoping to catch the ac-tors’ voices under the voice-over. His lack of emotion made it comical when, for example, a woman would scream OH MY GOD!!!!! and the lektor would provide a monotone ‘Boże’ [God] in translation, Andrusco added. An obvious surprise to a Canadian, the voice-over is also a shocker for other Europeans. When a German, French or Italian turn on the TV to watch ‘House’ they know that the actors‘

that ‘the Poles like it’. I’m glad that cin-ema in Poland doesn’t follow the same example, he added.

Lektor as artistUnless you are watching an animated movie, a rare example of great trans-lation on television, dubbing is offen-sive to Polish ears. I did think it was better than dubbing because at least the original dialogue was still play-ing, Andrusco agrees. Subtitles, many Poles feel - especially the older gen-eration - are a nuisance. They are too small to see from far away and they zoom across the screen much too fast. Such are Polish habits, said Joanna Stempień-Rogalińska, spokesperson for Telewizja Polska (TVP), the state-run television broadcaster. Ever since Polish television started showing for-eign programming, in the early 1970s, it was always translated through a le-ktor. Rogalińska also emphasized that a good voice-over is ‘value-added’ to the production, that it is an art in itself. It’s not just a mechanic reading. They are creators, artists, she added, giving the example of the late Jan Suzin, who was known for narrating westerns. It all de-pends on the type of viewer, however, admits Rogalińska. More and more TV stations, who generally attract younger viewers than TVP, such as the commer-cial broadcaster TVN, are introducing subtitles. And with digital television you have a choice of voice-over or subti-tles. While the trend may be changing, it will be a long time before the ‘char-ismatic’ male voices give ground to lit-tle letters zooming across the screen. TVP and BBC statistics from 2007-2008 say that, respectively, 45% and 52% of Poles prefer the lektor version, with only 4% and 8% saying they are subtitle fans. And dubbing is also on the rise, according to Rogalińska. TVP is increasing its dubbed programming. No doubt the Polish voice-over phe-nomenon will continue to amuse and bewilder foreigners, but at least now they will be able to turn off the nasal voice of Walker, Texas Ranger, any time they want. by Hanna Kozłowska

mouth movements won’t match the sound, but it will seem that they are speaking German, Italian or French, despite being in a hospital in the mid-dle of New Jersey. For them, it’s ‘God bless dubbing.’ When a Norwegian or Dutch wants to watch ‘House’ they will expect to hear the original voice of TV’s favorite grumpy doctor and occasionally look at the subtitles

in their native language (ever wonder why their English was so good?). The voice-over, however, won’t surprise a Russian or a Bulgarian, as theirs are the only other countries in the world who use the same film translation technique. Yes, I was surprised about the lector when I first arrived said Leif Christiansen, a Danish consultant who has been in Poland for 14 years. In my opinion the German way is not good, but the Polish way is even worse and many of our Polish friends feel the same, so Im not so sure it can be said

The voice on the box

Hanna Kozłowska is Associate Editor of Poland Today. She occasionally helps the New York Times in Poland and is a freelance blog-ger for natemat.pl. Hanna has previously worked for the travel magazine Podróże and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. She is a recent graduate of Swarth-more College, Penn-sylvania, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Gazette.

Wait, why does January Jones talk like Chuck Norris?

‘Subtitles, many Poles feel, are a nuisance’

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