Introducing March's Speaker

Krzysztof (Krys) Stankiewicz

Born in Manchester (1952), bred in St. Helens where I attended West Park Grammar School and spent my formative years.

My twin brother Mike and I were brought up in a Polish-speaking household with a strong sense of Polish tradition and history. We didn’t speak English when we went to school, but we soon caught up! Being bi-lingual from an early age has undoubtedly enriched my life, as it has given me access to two very different cultures, in which I feel equally at home.

My first visit to Poland was in 1966 – a landmark year as it marked the Millennium of Polish Christianity. Poland had suffered badly during WW2 and even then there were visible signs of wartime damage and a sense that the country was still re-building. The Poles value their historical heritage and old cities, like Warsaw and Gdańsk, which had been substantially destroyed had been rebuilt as a national priority in the 40’s and 50’s, with their historic centres lovingly recreated from contemporary archive plans and drawings. I sensed that historical legacy – and the great desire to preserve it – very keenly right from my first visit. Subsequent visits in the 60’s and 70’s served only to strengthen this feeling.

In November 2017 my wife Ania and I moved to Poland after a lifetime in the UK. We’re in Słupsk, Ania’s home town in Pomorze (many people know it as Pomerania) in what is now NW Poland, but what before WW2 was the German Pommern (when the town was known as Stolp). Słupsk is a very old town, founded around 1000 years ago at the dawn of the modern Polish State. It has had a rich and varied history, one that to some extent has mirrored the changes that Poland itself has undergone over the centuries. Some of those changes we’ll be covering in my talk, which will focus mainly on the 400 years of the Rzeczpospolita, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which existed from 1386 to 1795.