The Colours of Slavs. At the end of the 18th century, on the wave of the French revolution and the new French flag — the tricolour — a combination of white, red and navy blue or dark blue, the pre-partition Poland also began to use this combination of colours.
Interestingly, this colour combination is considered common to all Slavic people the Pan-Slavic flag and currently most of the Slavic countries or nations have three-coloured flags with different colour layouts: white — red — blue sometimes navy blue : the Czech Republic, Croatia, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Republika Srpska, and the Sorbs.
Historically, however, the white-and-red flag is a Czech flag and is still considered to be the flag of Bohemia. Also, the three horizontal bands on flags are a Central European speciality. All we need to do is to compare the flag of Hungary, Romania or Bulgaria The birth of contemporary colours. The combined colours of white and red are linked to the celebrations surrounding the first anniversary of the Constitution of 3 May Ladies demonstrating their patriotic attitude attended events or took walks in parks wearing white dresses adorned with a red sash.
Men, on the other hand, wore white and red sashes. With the establishment of the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw , along with the constitution, Napoleon gave this dependent state The national cockade shall be the colours of the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — white with red. Article 2. Later, the invaders of Poland, consciously or negligently, often used these colours interchangeably; however, more often citing as appropriate the reversed combination of red and white colours.
On 3 May , Warsaw saw for the first time a crowd of demonstrators wearing white and red flags manufactured in textile mills. The Industrial Revolution in the service of national awakening White and red since After Poland regained independence, the Sejm approved the white and red version of the flag with the act of 1 August The width-to-length ratio specified in the act still applies. If these proportions differ, we can talk about national colours, but not the national flag.
At the same time, during the interwar period, another national symbol was used — a white eagle against a red background. This was the banner of the Republic of Poland.
The anthem was officially adopted in Coins were minted in and circulated in Unlike the minting of coins, the production of banknotes posed a bigger challenge. In , the National Bank of Poland introduced a new feature on its banknotes. During the 14 th and 15 th centuries, any foreign gold currency that was used in the duchies of Germany and Ruthenia was known as zloty. Poland created a national currency in , that was equivalent to 30 groschens of Prague and known as Polski zloty golden Polish.
Under the rule of Stanislaw August Poniatowski in the 18 th century, the zloty became the official currency. It was replaced by the Russian rouble from and by the Polish mark from After WWI, the resulting economic crisis and hyperinflation led to the reintroduction of the zloty.
After undergoing several devaluations, a new zloty was introduced in PLZ that equaled old zloties. Poland has not yet perished, So long as we still live. What the foreign force has taken from us, We shall with sabre retrieve. Under your command We shall rejoin the nation. We'll cross the Vistula, we'll cross the Warta We shall be Polish. Rendered into flag form it served the early Polish kings as a a royal banner. By the eighteenth century white and red had come to be recognized as Poland's national colors and the country's first true national flag was a horizontal bicolor, white over red.
See also Polish Naval and Military Flags. Such flags served as the royal banners of the Polish kings and were not national flags as the term is understood today. In the sixteenth century, however, an ensign with vertical stripes of red and white with the eagle on the red stripe is known to have been used at sea. The Saxon kings used a royal banner with the shield of the arms of Saxony on the breast of the eagle and the last king of Poland, Stanislav II, had a similar banner with his personal arms on the eagle's breast.
Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was Eastern Europe's most wealthy and powerful state.
A confederated elective monarchy, it comprised most of present-day Poland, the Baltic states, East Prussia, and much of Ukraine and Belorussia. It evolved from the de facto personal union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that had existed since the fourteenth century and which was formalized in the sixteenth century.
But the commonwealth's complex constitution was fatally defective. Political instability gradually undermined the state and by the middle of the eighteenth century the Commonwealth was a prey to its increasingly powerful neighbors.
The independence of Poland was extinguished in the second half of the eighteenth century by Prussia, Austria and Russia in a series of three territorial partitions. The last of these, in , wiped Poland from the map. The various flags of the Commonwealth were striped red-white red, charged with a quartering of the arms of Poland and Lithuania. Ducal Standard. State Flag Though the once-powerful Polish kingdom was swallowed up by Russia, Prussia and Austria in the three partitions of the late eighteenth century, Polish nationalism remained strong.
Napoleon Bonaparte gave it expression when in he stripped Prussia and Austria of lands gained in the partitions of Poland, using them to create the Duchy of Warsaw. Though the Duchy was little more than a vassal state of France, Poles hoped that it would make possible a revival of the Kingdom of Poland. These hopes were dashed, however, by the defeat of Napoleon. A horizontal white-red bicolor—identical to the current Polish flag—is known to have been used and though its status is uncertain it may have served as the state flag.
Tsar's Standard as King of Poland. The Congress of Vienna sought as far as possible to restore "legitimacy" to the European order but recognized that many of the changes wrought by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars could not be reversed. Thus, though the Duchy of Warsaw was abolished and some of its territory was given to Prussia and Russia, the remainder was fashioned into a Kingdom of Poland in personal union with the Russian Empire.
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