Gregory's Server5/ Central Europe has of course been a region of great change over the centuries even into the modern era: not a single country that Poland 🇵🇱 bordered in 1990 still exists!
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 7/ The different historical backgrounds of the various regions of modern Poland 🇵🇱 continues to have cultural and political implications today. Some commentators refer to "Poland A" and Poland B" roughly corresponding to the formerly German parts of Poland (A) and the formerly Russian and Austrian parts (B). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_A_and_B here is a map of 2020 election results which roughly mirrors the divisions from a hundred years previously 8/ The border shifts leads to some odd situations like a Polish 🇵🇱 train line that crosses back across a strip of Germany 🇩🇪 between two Polish stations. 9/ While Poland 🇵🇱 has no territorial exclaves, there is a massive Polish diaspora, especially since Poland joined the EU 🇪🇺 in 2004. As an example Polish is the second most spoken language in 🇮🇪 Ireland, with Poles making up >2% of the population. 10/ Final bit of #geoweirdness: Polish 🇵🇱 postal codes consist of five digits, but there is a dash between the 2nd and 3rd digits (example: "12-345"), which is good fun for software that assumes postcodes contain only alphanumeric characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Poland See our guide to common misconceptions about postal codes: https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-think-about-postcodes-and-geocoding |
6/ The modern borders were (with a few minor tweaks) set after WWII, with Poland 🇵🇱 transferring a large chunk of territory in the east to the Soviet Union (now Lithuania 🇱🇹, Belarus 🇧🇾, and Ukraine 🇺🇦) and gaining German territories in the west.
The border with Germany 🇩🇪 was not fully finalized until 1992 following German reunification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_Border_Treaty
#geoweirdness