*** According to Polish folk wisdom, only marriages concluded in months that contain the letter “r” (in Polish) are said to be successful. That would exclude maj (May), as well as styczeń (January), luty (February), kwiecień (April), lipiec (July) and listopad (November).
*** As seen in the preceding entry, months of the year are not capitalized in Polish. Neither are days of the week, the names of religious orders (franciszkanin, felicjanka), city-dwellers (londyńczyk, gdańszczanin) and cars makes (ford, fiat, mercedes), unless they happen to be the first word in a sentence.
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*** Nearly 97% of
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*** Kevlar, the DuPont fiber first marketed in 1971 and used in bullet-proof vests, was invented by Pol-Am chemist Stephanie Kwołek. Seventy years earlier, the
*** Warsaw International Airport is named after composer Fryderyk Chopin, Kraków has
*** The Polish-American Symphony Orchestra, based in suburban
*** The Polish flag displayed upside down (with the red field at the top and the white one at bottom) is exactly the same as the official flags of
*** The “pierwsze piętro” or first floor in
*** Starka, a brandy known in the
*** Poland’s largest cities are: Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk, Szczecin, Bydgoszcz, Katowice, Lublin, Gdynia, Białystok, Częstochowa, Sosnowiec, Radom and Kielce.
*** The statue of a fire-breathing dragon is a major attraction outside the Dragon’s Cave at the food of Kraków’s
*** Hippocrene Books is
*** Poland, which is on Central European Time, switched from winter time to summer time (known in the US as daylight-saving time) on March 30th by pushing the clock ahead one hour.
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*** Snuff-taking has long been a part of the heritage of the Kashubians, an ethnic subgroup of farmers and fishermen inhabiting
*** The closest thing Polonia has to
*** A distinctly Polish piece of headwear is the visored four-cornered hat which is part of the regulation dress uniforms of the military and other uniformed services. It is based on the traditional “rogatywka” which forms part of the men’s Krakowiak outfit.
*** The world’s largest oil painting is the “Crucifixion”, painted by Polish artist Jan Styka and first displayed at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, may be viewed in a specially built pavilion at Los Angeles’ sprawling Forest Lawn Memorial Park (cemetery).
*** On the control panel of a Polish elevator 1 is the American second floor (the floor above the ground floor), the P is the ground floor (parter) and the 0 is the basement. If you see 00, that means there is a below-basement level such as an underground parking garage.
*** Officially the hue of red specified for the Polish flag is vermilion (in Polish: ”cynober”) which is a bright-red pigment made from mercuric sulfide. The flag with a crowned white eagle on a red shield in the white upper half is flown by the President of Poland, Polish diplomatic legations broad and Polish ships at sea.
Do you know what your Polish name means?
For a custom-researched analysis of what your Polish surname means, how many people share it, where they live and whether a coat of arms goes with it, please airmail of $15 check (adding $5 for each additional surname or 5 surnames for $30) to:
Robert Strybel
ul. Kaniowska 24
01-529 Warsaw, Poland
Also included is a packet of genealogical leads (Web sites and other contact data of genealogical firms, organizations and researchers) that many Polish-American root-tracers have found quite helpful.