United Kingdom
Poland Travel and Destination Guide
BACKGROUND INFO
Full Name
Republic of Poland
Capital City
Warsaw
Area
312,685 sq km
Population
38,518,250
Time Zone
GMT/UTC +1
Daylight Saving Start
last Sunday in March
Daylight Saving End
last Sunday in October
Weights Measures System
Metric
Geography
With primeval forest, sand dunes, coastal lakes, beaches, islands, caves, craters, a desert, and a peninsula called 'Hel', it's fair to say that the Polish landscape is eclectic. Its neighbours are interesting too; Poland is bordered by seven countries and one sea. Its northwest border is the 524km (326mi) Baltic coastline, in the west it shares 460km (286mi) with Germany, to the south it borders the Czech and Slovak republics (1310km/814mi), and to the east it shares borders with northeast Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Russia (1244km/773mi). Poland is more than twice the size of Nepal and four times the size of the Czech Republic. Some 52% of the land is agricultural, and almost 30% is forested. Poland's landscape was largely forged during the last ice age, when the Scandinavian ice sheet advanced southward across the Plains and receded some 10,000 years later. Now there are four discernable landscape zones: the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains in the south, the Baltic Sea in the North, and the vast central lowlands and north-flowing rivers of the lake belt in between.
Languages
• Polish (official)
A western variant of the group of Slavonic languages (which includes Czech and Slovak).
• German (other)
• English (other)
People
Polish (96.7%), German (0.4%), Ukrainian (0.1%)Belarussian (0.1%), other (2.7%)
Religion
Roman Catholic (95%), other (5%)
Government Type
Republic
Government Leaders
Lech Kaczyński
President (head of state)
Donald Tusk
Prime Minister (head of government)
Country Dialing Code
48
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