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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.

9/ While Poland has no territorial exclaves, there is a massive Polish diaspora, especially since Poland joined the EU in 2004.

As an example Polish is the second most spoken language in Ireland, with Poles making up >2% of the population.

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

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

@opencage @ekeshkekesh this is actually more German railway line than Polish. It goes from Görlitz to Zittau and crosses the border several times. Of course, it's older than the border.

During East Germany times this border was really heavily guarded. But one station, serving German town of Ostritz, was on the Polish side of the river. How to solve this conundrum? The passengers were allowed to leave the train on the Polish side, in Krzewina, and were escorted by armed border guards over the bridge to Germany. As far as I know, it wasn't allowed to enter the station from Polish side.

According to Wikipedia, the train had to have window blinds shut during the travel through Poland.