#Poland x Warsaw

[marietheran-archived]

Interesting things about Warsaw #1:

Honest-to-goodness bullet holes from 1944 in older walls (with plaques next to them)

Much more numerous chinks that just might be bullet holes in the walls (without identification)

We've also got a church that was destroyed by the Germans and rebuilt, and they embedded fragments of the old walls and side altars into the structure. Looking more or less the way you expect something that was bombed to the ground to look.

And a different church where they have a Crucifix in several parts mounted on a wall.

Honestly, I've been to a church in the Old City a few times in my life, and I find something of that sort near every time.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't even particularly like this city, but the weight of history bearing down on it is something.

[stillunusual]

Ah yes….Marie Antoinette, who was famous for saying "let them eat polonium"…. David Lammy became the UK's Foreign Secretary on 5th July 2024, following the Labour Party's landslide general election victory.

Sixteen years earlier, while appearing on Celebrity Mastermind, he responded to the question: "what was the married name of the scientists Marie and Pierre, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 for their research into radiation?", with the answer: "Antoinette"….

The correct answer was "Curie", but I see how he made the connection. 🤣😂

Lammy is probably also unaware that Marie Curie was Polish. She was born in 1867 in Warsaw, which was still under Russian occupation following the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century.

She was originally called Maria Skłodowska.

She studied at Warsaw's clandestine "Flying University", where she began her practical scientific training.

The Flying University (in Polish: Uniwersytet Latający) was an underground educational system which existed from 1885 to 1905 in Warsaw, and gave young people the opportunity to attend classes that operated outside the censorship and control of the Russian authorities.

She later said that "if I had not been taught chemical analysis by Professor Milicer and Dr Kossakowski in Warsaw, I would not have isolated Radium"….

Although she emigrated to France, graduated with degrees in physics and mathematics at the University of Sorbonne and married French physicist Pierre Curie, she never lost her sense of Polish identity and always referred to herself as Maria Skłodowska-Curie. She taught her daughters to speak Polish and named the first chemical element she discovered "Polonium" after her native country.

Maria Skłodowska-Curie emerged as the first female scientist to gain global recognition and undeniably stood among the great scientists of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields (chemistry and physics).

Two days after being appointed to his new role, David Lammy flew to Warsaw for talks with his Polish counterpart Radek Sikorski. I wonder if he noticed any of Warsaw's memorials, murals and other tributes to Maria Skłodowska-Curie while he was there….

[evermoredeluxe]

“I told you not to wear that tonight” A fan was wearing the same Karma jacket hahah

- The Eras Tour in Warsaw, Poland (N1) on August 1, 2024 (x)

[oncanvas]

Falling Star, Witold Pruszkowski, 1884

Oil on canvas 168 x 132 cm (66.14 x 51.97 in.) National Museum, Warsaw, Poland

[tswiftupdatess]

Taylor Swift performs ''Red x Maroon'' mashup as the second surprise song on piano at The Eras Tour in Warsaw, Poland Night 2! 🎹 (August 2, 2024)

[mortem-writes]

1. A Widow's Bite | Simon Riley x Black Widow!Reader

Fic Masterlist- ❋ Read this on Ao3 ❋

Main tags: Innocent reader is accused of being a traitor trope, torture and interrogation, AFAB reader, questionably platonic bed sharing, strangers to lovers, sloooow burn, eventual smut, angst/hurt/comfort, kidfic Chapter word count: 1.8k

>> BUDAPEST-KELETI STATION, HUNGARY

>> November 3rd, 2019

Barkov is dead, and you are running for your life.

The city is busy despite the cold weather, and the awareness that time is running out sits heavy on the edges of your mind.

You surge through the throngs of people, and finally you enter the train station with a sense of trepidation pounding through your veins, but there are no yells, no bullets, only the sound of people bustling about the platform and the rare warmth of a pale winter sun peeking through the high windows. Your heart is throwing itself against your ribcage, and sweat beads under your collar.

Time seems to slow with every passing second as you wait in line at the ticket office. You can feel your watch leisurely tick against the rabbit-quick pulse at your wrist. You count the seconds. Feel the space between each tick stretch and unspool. You tap your feet to expel the pent-up energy, and you can feel the slim knife you slid into your boot earlier that day shift over your ankle joint with every mindless movement.

Unable to stop throwing furtive glances over your shoulder, you hand over one of your passports to buy a ticket when it is your turn, and then pick at your fingernails absentmindedly. You can't stop your eyes from darting about and scanning the crowd. There's tension stitched into every fibre and every layer of muscle in your body as you expect a hand to clamp down on your wrist or a gunshot to punch through the air or something to happen at any second, but then the ticket officer hands over to you both your passport and your literal ticket to freedom with a tepid smile. You relax— slightly.

You step onto a train heading for Warsaw with nothing but five passports, five identities, and a handgun stashed in your satchel with a bundle of cash.

The train pulls out of the station, gathering speed and, within a handful of minutes, Budapest falls behind with your past entombed within the old city walls.

>> GEORGE BUSH CENTER FOR INTELLIGENCE

>> VIRGINIA, UNITED STATES

>> November 5th, 2019

Barkov is dead, but his legacy is not.

At least not yet.

Despite being determined to rectify that, Laswell feels that either her skull is going to implode into a migraine or her eyes will be rendered useless if she spends any longer staring at beaming bright computer screens, and squinting at various complicated maps littered with minute scribbles and equally minute symbols.

Following the news of Barkov's death, his forces had scattered and his followers all across Russia and Urzikstan had been sent into a frenzy without a leader to guide them. The mayhem has spiralled out of control, and Barkov's bases and facilities are cropping up on the map in the dozens every time a new intelligence report lands on Laswell's desk.

The interns had long since gone home, and the clock above the door implores her to retire for the day. Laswell knows that option is probably what's healthy, but she's nothing if not obsessive at heart and a workaholic, especially when all the current leads on this case look like a massive ball of knotted yarn just waiting to be untangled.

The maps, the profiles, the photographs, the mountains of scattered files, and the wall of flickering screens— all of it— a puzzle, ready to be solved.

The job will get done, and with what the leads spiralling from Barkov look like, it needs to get done as soon as possible. As the clock steadily ticks away, and time drags Laswell into the early hours of the morning, she discovers that Barkov's secrets have secrets.

The leads spiral all across the map. France. Austria. Belarus. Poland. Siberia.

Internment camps. Massacres. Bombing civilian blocks. Trafficking weapons. Trafficking people.

The secrets unravel, the war crimes are stacking on top of each other, and the migraine sets in. She follows a lead that seizes her attention and puts a ball of dread in her stomach but seemingly leads to a dead end.

She reads for hours about young girls, often left orphaned from Barkov's killings, taken from orphanages in Urzikstan in droves and mysteriously disappearing from the face of the Earth. Laswell sits back after a few dedicated hours of digging as far as she can into the missing children. She sits and lets her mind sweep over the facts, letting her thoughts rove over the massive void of information in the middle of the story like a tongue feeling around the bloodied gums where a tooth had been. She wonders what has happened to these girls, somehow feeling that the answer to their disappearances may fill the pothole in their intelligence.

Laswell thinks of her young niece, about how her niece is now the same age as these girls when they went missing, and decides that she will find these girls at any cost, or at least make sure their story is known and whole. All the facts or none.

Sighing, Laswell pinches the bridge of her nose, lost in thought, just as the sun peeks over the DC skyline and dyes the sky in hues of purple and orange. She pulls a pack of migraine relief pills from her desk and swallows a handful of them down with a mouthful of cold coffee.

Then, just as the coffee settles unpleasantly on her empty stomach, the thought hits her as swift as lightning.

Belarus.

A money trail showed that Barkov's forces had frequently transported cargo to and from the country. She'd brushed the information off earlier, assuming they were solely transporting weapons and deeming it irrelevant to the missing girls. Now, however...

When Laswell had just begun her career in intelligence, she'd heard whispers of a covert facility buried somewhere in the snowy eastern European countryside in mission reports, and knew that half of the intelligence community believed it to be nothing more than a ghost story meant to intrigue the recruits. She knew that those who believed in its existence were convinced the KGB— now FSB— operated it long before and long after the USSR crumbled and Belarus gained independence.

Finding the base will be difficult, it had eluded the CIA for the better part of a century after all, but Barkov's death has condemned his empire to a slow death by a thousand cuts. Eventually, someone will slip up and give away the base, and the 141 will be there to wipe away the footprints of Barkov's legacy. 

>> BREST OBLAST, BELARUS

>> December 17th, 2019

Barkov is dead, and it's up to the 141 to wipe the shit stain off the map.

They don't have the full story yet, but for now Laswell has given them coordinates pointing deep into the snowy rural landscape of the Belarusian countryside.

Ghost watches a litter of workers mill around the dark tarmac like ants, clearing the runway of any stray streaks of ice and snow under a wan grey sky, and hoists his pack further up his shoulder as he and the rest of the 141 pile into a small cargo plane that looks more like a starved bird than a machine capable of flight. They amble noisily down the narrow aisle, dropping their packs into their seats and chattering amongst themselves, the sounds ricocheting off the blank walls.

Just as he’s settling in his chosen seat, someone drops heavily with a theatrical sigh into the seat to Ghost’s right. Sergeant MacTavish. Soap. Ridiculous fucking name but whatever he supposes. Soap grins crookedly at Ghost and scratches absentmindedly at a band aid taped to the jut of his bruised cheekbone — just one of many scattered across his face and knuckles that serve as clear testaments to Soap’s inability to keep himself out of trouble. 

“Laswell must be havin’ a field day, right LT?”

Ghost pictures in his mind Laswell hunched over a cramped desk for the past month just to find a measly single line of coordinates pointing them to arse fuck nowhere, and can’t help but think the poor woman isn’t having anything other than hell on earth let alone a field day. 

“Why’d you say that?” he asks gruffly, already feeling irritation seeping into him as he begrudgingly continues the conversation. 

“The CIA finally nailing a commie base after 60 years? Must be feelin’ proud o’themselves.”

“You’d think they’d be more irritated that it’s taken them that long. We don’t even know if this is it.”

Ghost discovers that Soap is the type of guy to embellish his words with expressive hand gestures, and he does so now. ���Have some faith, LT. Hear both sides of the story before jumping to conclusions.”

“The only sides the CIA will know are the sides of my boot when I fit it up their arses if this goes nowhere.”

That cracks Johnny up, and Ghost looks away to hide the way the crow’s feet framing the corners of his eyes crinkle slightly under his mask. 

----------

What they find inside is nothing short of a bloodbath.

The facility was all but abandoned when they had made their way to the outer walls. No guards. No lights. No noise except the whistling of the wind sweeping over the snow.

The silence around them serves as an indicator of the deafening noise it must have taken for so many bodies to litter the floor. There are bullets embedded in the marble wall in the foyer, and the team picks their way inside over the heaps of dead guards. The blood is old enough to have coagulated, and there’s an unpleasant sticky noise every time Ghost lifts his boot to step forward.

They’re on the second level now, and the layers of spilt blood get thicker the deeper they go into the facility. Ghost passes a room before doubling back and entering, he takes a glance in and sees rows upon rows of wrought-iron beds with thin mattresses atop them. His head tilts curiously to the side as he spies a girl’s hair ribbon sprawled on the floor and a tiny pair of mary jane shoes tucked neatly under one of the beds.

Soap follows him, catching his attention silently to show Ghost the pairs of handcuffs dangling from each iron bedpost. The atmosphere is heavy, like the air in the room has a story of pain to tell and it’s suffocating them. 

Price is the one to palm his radio when they regroup and relay what they’ve seen, “Watcher-1, I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that the lead’s legitimate.”

“I’ll be more glad to know if you’ve found the children,” Laswell returns crisply.

“Somebody got here before us, wiped out the whole place. ‘S a bloodbath.” The air shivers with tension. “No kids in sight now, though there’s evidence to suggest that they were here some time ago.”

A few seconds pass in silence. Ghost imagines that Laswell’s eyebrows are pinched like they always are whenever she runs into a problem or defeat. A bit more than a month of searching, for nothing more than a mass grave. 

A sigh comes over the line, but Laswell’s voice is determined. “We better find this somebody then.”

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem Artist: Maxim Vorobiev (Russian, 1787-1855) Date: 1835 Genre: interior Movement: Romanticism Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 109.5 cm (43.1 in) high x 150 cm (59 in) wide Location: National Museum in Warsaw, Poland

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

"A Love Supreme" - Alice Coltrane, Jazz Jamboree, Warsaw, Poland, October 23, 1987

Just about 60 years ago this week, John Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner went out to Van Gelder Recording Studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to record A Love Supreme. Obviously, this record has become a monument over the decades — much more than just a record. But I always wonder whether the Coltrane Quartet thought of it as anything more than just another date, at least at first; after all, the group minus Coltrane also recorded McCoy Tyner Plays Ellington that week, too — a great, but very different vibe! "We didn't talk about a lot of things," Tyner said. "I mean, I didn't know what we were going to do. We couldn't really explain why things came together so well, you know, and why it was, you know, meant to be. I mean, it's hard to explain things like that."

Yeah it is! But here's the late/great Greg Tate doing a pretty good job of it:

"What the Coltrane quartet had was two of music's more elusive qualities in combination — namely, melody and gravitas. You can hear them in certain Black voices that came to fore in the '60s — Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X — and in certain rappers today like Rakim, Nas, GZA. But the Coltrane Quartet, like King, also gave voice and timbre to their heaviest burden, a swollen, implacable compassion for the human condition that required that everything they had be laid on the line. You can't buy that level of commitment off a rack, download it from the Net neither, and you damn sure can't fake it. You can only deliver it from evil and maybe even bleed for it: Tyner has said he knew it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted." 

Enchanted, focused, uplifted — that's what you'll be after checking out a sublime video of Alice Coltrane, Ravi Coltrane, Reggie Workman and Roy Haynes (who sadly just passed away at the age of 99 this fall) tackling some Love Supreme themes in Warsaw about two decades after John left this earth. ELATION — ELEGANCE — EXALTATION.

[eras-tour-updates]

Suburban Legends x New Years Day

Warsaw, Poland N1

[eddy25960]

Ignacy Łopieński (1865-1941). Male nude bent in the pose of sawing a board (1890). Chalk, paperboard. Dated, signed. 150 cm x 99,5 cm. National Museum in Warsaw, Poland.

[usafphantom2]

German Heinkel He 111 aircraft bombing Warsaw, Poland, Sep 1939

@ron_eisele via X

[polishwomenartists-sztukakobiet]

Irena Łuczyńska-Szymanowska (Polish, 1890-1966)

“Woman Reading”

Oil on canvas 56 x 49 cm

National Museum, Warsaw, Poland

Irena Łuczyńska-Szymanowska (ur. 15 lipca 1890 w Górze Kalwarii, zm. 30 sierpnia 1966 w Warszawie) – polska artystka malarka, portrecistka.

[evermoredeluxe]

Crowd goes wild at her fingertips 💛

- The Eras Tour in Warsaw, Poland (N3) on August 3, 2024 (x)

[darkmaga-returns]

Polish-Ukrainian relations might continue worsening due to Ukraine’s provocations and Poland’s responses to them that it promulgates with society’s sentiments in mind.

The Polish milblog platform WarNewsPL shared footage on X late last week showing the Ukrainian Armed Forces flying the Bandera flag of the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) atop a Polish armored personnel carrier (APC). This prompted Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz to post around an hour later that this is “a provocation that should not have happened” and declare that he’s organizing an urgent meeting with the Ukrainian attaché in Warsaw “to clarify the matter.”

There are several reasons why this is so scandalous. First, the UPA is considered a terrorist group in Poland due to it targeting the Polish state and civilians during the interwar period, after which they genocided Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during World War II. Second, Ukraine refuses to this day to exhume and properly bury those genocide victims’ remains despite already doing the same for over 100,000 Wehrmacht troops. And third, Poland has given more vehicles to Ukraine than anyone else.

Flying Bandera’s UPA flag atop a Polish APC accordingly amounts to Ukraine spitting in Poland’s face. The public paid for this vehicle that the state donated to its neighbor as part of the aid that it’s provided in solidarity with Kiev’s cause. Ukraine wouldn’t even be able to fight to this day had it not been for Polish aid and Poland tacitly promising continued support if Kiev abandoned spring 2022’s peace talks. It’s therefore so disrespectful that Ukraine would fly that terrorist and genocidal flag atop a Polish vehicle.

[version-13]

=\=/X/=\= 2023 Warsaw, Poland

[tswiftupdatess]

Taylor Swift performs ''I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) x I Can See You'' as the FIRST surprise song on guitar at The Eras Tour in Warsaw, Poland Night 2! 🎸 (August 2, 2024)