Cicero's Songs

The Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski usually gets a good press in the UK. His fluent English and his academic intelligence help him stand out as an individual, while Poland is one of the few countries of Central/Eastern Europe where the British have a clear and generally positive view of what kind of country it is. It also helps a lot that Mr. Sikorski, as a graduate of Oxford University, has a big network of friends in Britain- including his former Bullingdon Club confrere , Boris Johnson. Mr. Sikorski's wife is the American historian and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her magisterial book Gulag , Anne Applebaum, and she is also a regular visitor to Britain. Yet despite his close connections with the UK, and his former British citizenship, which he only renounced on becoming Polish Defence Minister in 2006, it is clear that Sikorski is hardly an uncritical friend of the UK. Indeed the Anti-EU faction in the UK would argue that he was hardly a friend at all, as he seeks...

Krakow. A May morning, before the dawn of a Golden day of clear sunshine. It is the early 1990s. I have walked from the Krakow Glowny station to the Main Square in the dark. The Square- Rynek- is empty and I am alone. It will be many hours before I can go and find a place to stay. I sit on a stone bench, resting my rucksack by my side. The Rynek then was uncluttered, so the full sweep of the magnificent cloth hall was unhidden. To my left the Kosciol Mariacki loomed, smoky, with a single gleam of bright light behind a shutter of a room high up on one of the towers. The sky was growing lighter by the minute. across the City the bells of churches, monasteries and Wawel Cathedral began to ring for 5 o'clock. A chorus glorying in the new day. High up in the tower, the shutter opens, and a man holding a silver trumpet can be seen. It is him and me in the whole square. Then he begins to play. The Hejnal Mariacki - the warning to close the gates against the Tatars, the Mongols, th...

After six European countries in 10 days, I return to the white nights of Tallinn ready to face a large pile of work. However, I must now catch up with the writing of this blog which has been much neglected of late. I spent about a week in Hungary, spending time with several American friends, then a quick trip to Estonia's southern neighbours: Latvia and Lithuania and then a trip to Warsaw. While in Warsaw I witnessed with friends (and several relatives of the new President) the election of Bronislaw Komerowski as the fourth President of the Polish III Republic. The second round of the election was a straight choice between Komerowski and the twin brother of the late President, killed in the Smolensk air disaster, Lech Kaczynski. Jaroslaw "Jarek" Kaczynski has previously served as Prime Minister, when his brother first became President. Jarek Kaczynski is- to say the least- a controversial figure. A profound Social Conservative, he is close to the most reactionary figure...

The death of President Lech Kaczynski is hard to write about. It bears so many echoes of the great tragedies of twentieth century Polish history. President Kaczynski is the third leader of Poland to suffer sudden death: The first President of the Second Republic, Gabriel Narutowicz, was assassinated, and of course the wartime Prime Minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski was killed in plane crash in 1943. It is the death of Sikorski, rumoured, but never proven to be at the instigation of Stalin, that brings the most terrible echoes to Polish ears. Nor was President Kaczynski the only head of state to die on the plane in Smolensk. The last President-in-exile of the Second Republic, Ryszard Kaczorowksi, was also on the plane. When Lech Walesa was sworn in as the first President of the Third Republic, it was from President Kaczorowski that he took the insignia of office, while the insignia of the "Polish People's Republic", worn by General Jaruzelski was retired to a museum. T...

As the results continue to come in from the Polish elections, two things are already clear: Firstly that turnout has risen sharply, to 55%- which is the highest since 1989; Secondly that the country has decisively rejected the ultra-nationalist Samo obrona - Self Defence and the ultra-Conservative Lega Polskich Rodzin - the League of Polish Families. Even more crucially, despite the benefit that the ruling PiS - Law and Justice- have gained from the demise of their erstwhile allies, it is the Liberal opposition, Platforma Obwytelska that has stormed to victory. The Liberals were supported by the young generation of Poles, who found the backward looking pugnaciousness of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski extremely difficult to take. The fact that the outgoing Prime Minister is the twin of the surviving President, Lech Kaczynski , will undoubtedly make life difficult for the incoming Prime Minister, Donald Tusk. However the scale of the victory of Civic Platform is so large that ...

I made a comment on the putatively Scottish antecedents of Lech Walesa. I see Lepidus suggest that Walesa is another version of the proto-Indo European word for stranger that gives English the word Welsh and the Germans the word Wendisch- and indeed is the root of the name Wallace, from which (it is suggested) the Walesa actually derives. I don't think- short of DNA evidence- that we can truly check to what degree Lech Walesa is actually Scottish- after all there were so many Scots who settled in Royal Prussia, and in particular the City of Gdansk (then, of course, Danzig), so there is every chance that the former President has at least some Scottish blood- if not from the first bearer of his surname. The area around Gdansk has a distinct identity- and, unusually for Poland, quite a strong accent. Indeed the Slavic population of that formerly most German of Provinzen, Prussia has not always regarded itself as Polish, but rather Kashub- or Kaszub, in its Polish spelling. The Kaszuby...

Two quotes from "Scots Wha Hae" in a single day- what can be the meaning of this? Lepidus pointed out a story in The Economist about Poles coming to the Highlands in significant numbers, many of whom have names that were originally Scottish. I think that the story might have come from a comment I made to Edward Lucas about Lech Walesa , whose name has been said, without any confirmation, to be a corruption of Wallace. Certainly the family is very much part of the area- and may be Kaszub - and of course the City of Gdansk does have two districts: Stare and Nowe Szkoty .