Latest / The Story of Poland: A Nation That Refused to Disappear — Fexingo History / The Secret of Polska-A Sacred Language That Saved a Nation
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, we've talked a lot about how Poland was erased from the map in the late 18th century—the partitions by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. But one thing that didn't disappear was the Polish language. In fact, it became a battleground. Luna: A battleground? Lucas: Exactly. The partitioning powers tried to suppress Polish. In Prussia, German was imposed in schools. In Russia, after the January Uprising of 1863, the use of Polish in public was banned entirely. But Poles found a way to fight back—with a secret language called Polska. Luna: Polska? That just means Poland in Polish, doesn't it? Lucas: It does, but this was something different. Polska was an invented cipher language—a kind of code that allowed patriots to communicate without the censors understanding. It was based on Polish but with a scrambled vocabulary, borrowed from other Slavic tongues, and even some made-up words. Luna: Who came up with that? Lucas: The origins are a bit murky, but a key figure was Jan Potocki—yes, the same Jan Potocki who wrote The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. He was a linguist and ethnographer, and in the late 18th century, he proposed a kind of pan-Slavic auxiliary language. That idea later got repurposed by Polish exiles after the November Uprising of 1830. Lucas: The Great Emigration—thousands of Poles fled to France, especially Paris. They set up organizations like the Towarzystwo Demokratyczne Polskie, the Polish Democratic Society. And they needed to coordinate with the underground back home without tipping off the censors. Lucas: So they developed Polska—a language that looked like gibberish to a Russian official but was perfectly intelligible to a Polish reader. For example, they'd replace common Polish words with synonyms from Czech or Russian, or invert word order, or use archaic terms that had fallen out of use. Luna: So it was like a secret handshake, but for words. Lucas: Exactly. And it was used in underground newspapers—the so-called bibuła, or tissue paper press—smuggled across borders. Polska allowed editors to print news of uprisings, calls to arms, and patriotic poetry without the authorities being able to shut them down for sedition. Lucas: One famous example is from the Wielkopolska Uprising of 1848, when Poles in the Prussian partition rose up. The insurgents used Polska in their dispatches. The Prussian police intercepted messages but couldn't read them. They assumed it was some kind of Slavic code, but they never cracked it. Luna: Did it actually work on a large scale, or was it more of a symbolic thing? Lucas: It worked well enough to frustrate the censors, but it had limitations. For one, it required training. Not every Polish peasant could read or write in the heavily modified Polska. So it was mostly used by the intelligentsia and the szlachta—the nobility. Lucas: There's also a controversy: some historians argue that Polska was a desperate fantasy, that it isolated the resistance from the common people. After all, the uprisings failed. Others say it kept the national spirit alive when the language itself was under attack. Luna: So it's a bit like the Polish language itself—a tool of survival. Lucas: That's a beautiful way to put it. And it ties into something I think about a lot—how fragile and resilient culture can be. You know, if you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you've seen how Poland kept reinventing itself. This show is our way of keeping those stories alive. Luna: And we do it without ads, thanks to listeners who support us. Lucas: Right. If you enjoy these conversations, you can help keep them going at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small gesture that makes a big difference for us. Luna: And we really appreciate it. Now, back to Polska—did it survive into the 20th century? Lucas: It faded after the partitions ended in 1918, but elements of it lingered in underground publications during World War II, when the Nazis banned Polish again. The Armia Krajowa used similar coded language in their bulletins. Lucas: So Polska wasn't just a 19th-century curiosity—it was a template. It showed that language itself could be a weapon. And it's a reminder that when a nation is erased, words become the last territory. Luna: I never thought of a secret language as a form of resistance. Thanks for sharing that. Lucas: Thanks for listening. Next time, we'll look at another hidden piece of Polish history—the forgotten female soldiers of the 1863 uprising.