The Country
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country of central Europe is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west. Poland also shares maritime boundaries with Denmark and Sweden.
It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships.
The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025 and in 1569 cemented its longstanding political association with Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin. The latter led to the forming of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous nations of 16th and 17th-century Europe, that became one of the first multicultural states in history, with minorities’ rights protected by the Union’s laws, with a liberal political system that adopted Europe's first modern constitution, the Constitution of 3 May 1791. In the mid-17th century, the state started to weaken and at the end of the 18th century the country was partitioned by neighbouring states.
The Treaty of Versailles in 1918 and the victory in the Polish–Soviet War restored the Polish independence and its key role in European. At the beginning of World War II in 1939, Poland was invaded by the German-Soviet, and in the following years devastated by the conflict. Five million inhabitants were killed, many of these casualties were the result of the extermination of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. As a member of the Eastern Bloc in the global Cold War, the Polish People's Republic was a founding signatory of the Warsaw Pact. In the wake of anti-communist movements in 1989, the communist government was dissolved and Poland re-established itself as a democratic republic.
The country has 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 15 of which are cultural. Poland is a founding member state of the United Nations, as well as a member of the World Trade Organization, NATO, and the European Union, including the Schengen Area.