From the moment you start living in Krakow you hear titillating rumours from the locals about Lwow. They make it sound like a romantic disreputable uncle who disappeared somewhere in the Amazon. Happily it didn’t disappear, it’s just over the border in Ukraine. Lwow was part of Poland for 400 years and then the capital of Galicia, under Austrian rule, for another century and a half. Krakow was also in Galicia, but was essentially a provincial town. Lwow was the cultural and political centre of this part of Poland for hundreds of years until 1939. It’s disappearance from the Polish map was a real wrench.

A discussion we’ve been having recently on this blog on whether Poland is poor or not, now has a surprising epilogue. This year the income of an average resident of theWarsaw region (the Masovian voivodship) will level to 88% of the EU average – says Eurostat. This is a great achievement: even though EU funding [...]