Postcards of the Past
Custom Search
Poland
Many of the postcards of Poland which appear on this website have been
provided by Waldemar Rudziecki of the Museum of Contemporary
Pomeranian Marine Handicraft in Gdynia. We are most grateful for the
opportunity to display these excellent images, and we urge any of you
who are in or near Gdynia to visit this museum - there are about 12,000
images of old postcards of towns and villages in Poland available to view
via a "Fotoplastikon" system which displays the postcards on LCD
screens throughout the museum. There are of course many other
attractions. Please use the navigation bars at the top or bottom of this
page to visit the town or village of your choice.
A Note on Polish Place Names.
The place names in today's Poland have changed frequently during the
last 200 years. Most locations in the former provinces of Silesia
(Schlesien), Pomerania (Pommern), Brandenburg & East Prussia
(Ostpreussen) kept their German names until 1945, but now they are no
longer used. In the Province of Posen and in West Prussia
(Westpreussen) both Polish and German names were used in the
records during the 19th century. Generally in West Prussia, German
names were used predominantly and the Polish ones only occasionally.
There are no particular problems with the place names in Congress
Poland and Galicia - in most cases their Polish form remained unchanged
or only slight modifications in their spelling occurred. The official Russian
versions of the place names in Congress Poland and the Western
gubernias of Russia (formerly Polish) usually differed only in spelling -
those differences reflected both the necessity of transliteration from the
Latin alphabet to the Cyrillic and some phonetic differences between
Polish and Russian. Except for Warsaw, we try to use the contemporary
Polish names in our Polish pages, although where the postcards are
predominately in German we use the German name. You will notice that,
to add to the confusion, many of the postcards give French versions, eg
Varsovie.
For more postcards of Poland, visit
http://www.castlesofpoland.com
Click on the logo above or search the internet for
even more Polish Postcards !
Search this website for
your favourite place !
Reproductions of postcards with a (Z) following the description may be purchased at Zazzle - click on the (Z).......................Please support our advertisers. We depend on their commissions to keep this website afloat, so bid on a cake tin at eBay or buy a book from Amazon !.................We are always grateful to receive images of old postcards, so if you would like to contribute to this website, please email us some good quality scans and we'll add them to the appropriate page, with of course an acknowledgement. Thanks !