With traumatic pasts and an anxious sense of sovereignty, we share a sense that we are trying to escape the trap of history
The Ukrainian anthem has been playing from the medieval tower of Krakow’s most important church, St Mary’s Basilica. St Mary’s Trumpet Call, a traditional bugle call played every hour, gave way to this sign of extraordinary times.
In Warsaw’s centre, by contrast, the now famous response to the Russian navy of soldiers defending an island in Ukraine is displayed in Cyrillic script on a huge illuminated sign: “Go fuck yourself.”
Karolina Wigura is a historian of ideas, board member of the Kultura Liberalna Foundation in Warsaw and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin
Jaroslaw Kuisz is a political analyst and essayist, editor-in-chief of the Polish weekly Kultura Liberalna and a policy fellow at the University of Cambridge
