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We are entering Europe... We will enter Europe... We will be in Europe... — the slogans that we have so demagogically repeated over the recent years, oblivious to the fact we have lived since our earliest days in the Middle of Europe. We wedded Europe for better for worse, for richer for poorer... We failed to maintain our statehood, losing it towards the end of the 18th century. Reborn within a more modest territory after the First World War, and even lesser after the Second, pushed westwards from the east and not completely independent over a few decades, we do make every effort to gain the place Poland deserves among European States.
Yet the centuries of presence in the key point of Europe mean more than just the thousand years of our statehood — it is also the thousand years of Polish culture which, from the first days of Poland, was Latin: which means Western. Together with Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Croatians we were the antemurale of Latin culture in Europe, when our eastern neighbours evolved a culture that took its roots not in Rome but in Byzantium. To Lithuania: a country that had remained pagan until the 14th century, we brought Latin culture.
The central theme of this volume of studies, containing over thirty works grouped into four chronological cycles, proves the centuries of cultural links between Poland and Europe.
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