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2/ At first glance you might think Poland does not have much #geoweirdness

The country has no exclaves or overseas territories.

Indeed, Poland is the 9th most rectangular country (Egypt is first):

https://pappubahry.com/misc/rectangles/

but there are a few bits of oddness

3/ Poland is famed for its sandy beaches, 1000s of lakes, and deep forests.

So you may be surprised to know it also has a desert.

The small Błędów Desert is not far from Krakow, and is jokingly refered to as the "Polish Sahara"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C5%82%C4%99d%C3%B3w_Desert

4/ The borders of Poland have changed many, many times over the years.

Wikipedia has a great guide full of maps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Poland

5/ Central Europe has of course been a region of great change over the centuries even into the modern era: not a single country that Poland bordered in 1990 still exists!

6/ The modern borders were (with a few minor tweaks) set after WWII, with Poland transferring a large chunk of territory in the east to the Soviet Union (now Lithuania , Belarus , and Ukraine ) and gaining German territories in the west.

The border with Germany was not fully finalized until 1992 following German reunification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_Border_Treaty

7/ The different historical backgrounds of the various regions of modern Poland continue to have cultural and political implications today.

Some commentators refer to "Poland A" and Poland B" roughly corresponding to the formerly German parts of Poland (A) and the formerly Russian and Austrian parts (B).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_A_and_B

here is a map of 2020 election results which roughly mirrors the divisions from a hundred years previously

8/ The border shifts lead to some odd situations like a Polish train line that crosses back across a strip of Germany between two Polish stations.

10/ Final bit of #geoweirdness: Polish postal codes consist of five digits, but there is a dash between the 2nd and 3rd digits (example: "12-345"), which is good fun for software that assumes postcodes contain only alphanumeric characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Poland

See our guide to common misconceptions about postal codes:

https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-think-about-postcodes-and-geocoding

11/ That's it for our look at Poland's #geoweirdness.

Thanks for reading and boosting. What did we overlook?

We have more threads about specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, etc on our blog. Some are still on twitter, but week by week we are moving them to mastodon (and writing new threads).

Enjoy: https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads