Thursday, March 22, 2012

Poznan: Sweden


When listening to the history lessons on Poznan, there were many mentions of Swedish people coming and plundering the town. The "Swedish flood" meant the Swedish army coming from the sea (we are just across the sea from Poland), flowing all over the country down to the southern border, then withdrawing and lugging all the wealth with it leaving only devastation in its wake. This apparently happened often enough to make Polish people invent a special expression to describe it...

Today I bought a post card to send to my parents. I asked for a stamp that would cover sending the card to Sweden and then one of the women in the information center where I bought the card asked if I was Swedish. She gave me a brochure on Poznan written in Swedish. Very good Swedish, but not Swedish a native speaker would use, so it is probably written by a Pole with good knowledge of Swedish.

As it turned out, it would actually have been cheaper to bring the card back to Japan and send it to Sweden from over there. Despite the Japanese yen now being very very strong. Japanese postage is ridiculously cheap.
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Location: Święty Marcin 31, 61-001 Poznań, Poland

4 comments:

  1. UnknownMarch 22, 2012 at 6:04 AM

    'Swedish flood' - my favorite part of history. Seriously. and now.... you have 'Polish flood' in Sweden lol (considering all workers coming to Sweden :P)

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    1. JonasMarch 22, 2012 at 6:11 AM

      I like the expression "Swedish flood". Some of my Swedish friends once visited a few castles in Poland (they like medieval stuff), and everywhere they went the guide was saying things like: "This hole in the wall. Swedish cannon made this!", and "There used to be a nice building here, but it was burnt by the Swedes"... :-)

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  2. AnonymousMarch 26, 2012 at 2:17 AM

    Actually the proper English word is "deluge"
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_%28history%29

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    1. JonasMarch 26, 2012 at 11:26 AM

      The people in Poznan that told me about it called it the Swedish flood, but I assume they were taught about the history in Polish :-)

      In Swedish, we apparently call the same thing "the Polish war", and translate the Polish expression with the same word we use for the flood in the Bible (the story of Noah's Ark).

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