Greater Poles Erotic

Greater Poles, Wielkopolanie in Polish, are the Poles of the western heartland around Poznań, Gniezno and Kalisz, and inside Poland they carry a clear reputation: thrifty, orderly, hardworking and good at organizing. Other Poles joke about it. Greater Poles mostly wear it as a badge. Their flat, lake-dotted farm country along the Warta is where the Polish state began. The Polans held it in the tenth century, Mieszko I accepted Christianity in 966, and Gniezno became the country's first archbishopric in 1000, which is why its archbishop still bears the title Primate of Poland. The region remains solidly Roman Catholic, though Leszno once sheltered Czech Brethren exiles and Lutheran and Jewish communities were part of town life for centuries. After the partitions the region spent more than a century under Prussian rule, and Germanization pressed hard: a state commission bought land for German settlers, and schools pushed German into religion lessons. Poles answered with what they called organic work, building cooperative banks, farmers' circles and associations to hold on to land and language. The schoolchildren of Września went on strike in 1901 rather than recite their catechism in German, and the peasant Michał Drzymała lived in a circus wagon after officials denied him a permit to build a house. In December 1918 Poznań rose in the Greater Poland Uprising, one of the few Polish insurrections that actually won. Nazi Germany later annexed the region as the Reichsgau Wartheland and deported hundreds of thousands of Poles, and in June 1956 Poznań's workers mounted the first of the mass protests that would shake communist Poland.

That Prussian century left marks on speech and the table. The Greater Poland dialect is one of Polish's main dialect groups, and Poznań's city speech mixes German loans such as fyrtel, a neighborhood, with local words like bimba for a tram and pyra for a potato. Pyry is also the rest of Poland's nickname for Poznań people, and pyry z gzikiem, potatoes with curd cheese and onion, is the regional staple. On St. Martin's Day, November 11, the city eats rogale świętomarcińskie, dense crescent pastries filled with white poppy seed, by the ton. Folk tradition holds on in pockets. The Biskupianie around Krobia, on lands once owned by the bishops of Poznań, still wear their costumes for church holidays and festivals. Around Zbąszyń, musicians play the kozioł, a big bagpipe carved with a goat's head that was long a fixture at weddings. And the Bambrzy on Poznań's edges descend from Catholic farmers who came from around Bamberg in the eighteenth century and became thoroughly Polish.