Poland

A thousand years between the great powers, surviving partition and conquest to rise again.

Poland's history is one of a nation that has repeatedly been erased from the map and remade by the will of its people. The Polish state emerged in the tenth century when the Piast duke Mieszko I accepted Christianity in 966, binding his realm to Latin Europe. Medieval Piast and Jagiellonian kings forged a powerful kingdom that, joined to Lithuania, became the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of early modern Europe's largest states and an experiment in noble republicanism. Decline, foreign interference and the paralysis of its own institutions led to the partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1795, when Russia, Prussia and Austria divided Poland out of existence for 123 years. Independence was restored in 1918, only for the Second Republic to be crushed in 1939 by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; the German occupation made Polish soil the site of the Holocaust and of staggering civilian death. Liberated into Soviet domination, Poland endured four decades of communist rule until the Solidarity movement helped bring it down, and the country returned to democracy, joining the European Union in 2004.