Are Poles mentally more Eastern European or Western European?

Your opinion?

what a stupid question...

obviously eastern european, along with our close-knit ukrainian, belarusian, czech, slovak, and russian counterparts.

That's a simplistic and quotidian reduction of a complicated question. And what's this "our" business? You're Canadian.

First explain characteristics of eastern and western mentality and then I will answer your question slavia

according to Norman Davis, Poles generally looked east prior to the period of the French revolution.

Exactly, they will have a mindset in line with those who have been exposed to a similar enviroment.

I guarantee a French baby will speak English if adopted by English speaking parents.

simple, north-eastern europeans are mostly slavic.

being polish-jewish from my dad's side, and belarusian/polish/russian from my mothers, I can safely tell u how similar our overall way of thinking really is.

We share a far stronger bond in the east, especially because we share the same slavic culture.

Where I specifically live in Toronto, there are many more russians and ukrainians, and even serbians, than Poles, and I interact with them almost every day.. believe me, I know what I'm talkin about. :)

btw, many posters on here are really full of horse sh**.... "you're canadian, what do u know?.... you don't pay taxes in Poland, you have no right to talk about this and that... blah blah blah..."

LMAO!! stop making me laugh... xD

Aren't Poles more like Western European - quiet, shy, hard working?

Poles are western Slavs and this is the end of the topic.

Just tell me how to stop making you type. You have spent your ENTIRE LIFE in North America. Your contact with other-expats is thrilling for THEM, I'm sure, but it brings no anthropological nor empirical information to the discussion. Norman Davies correctly decreed Poland the most Central European country for a reason. It's stuck in a whirlpool caused by the cultural, historical, nomadic, and military currents that has swirled around it for the last 800 years.

This tells us nothing

Slavic nationalist looked to the east, but they are Nazis scum in my eyes.

as I stated before - believe me, I know what I'm talkin about. :)

and milky..

if that's what u think, then u should pull them out of their sockets ASAP!

thanx u ~ <3

This is very true - the crossroads of Europe, like Janus with an eye in each direction. Look at the architecture in Poland's main cities - definitely western and look at the food - definitely eastern.

Only part of it is eastern (potato based foods and dumplings). I don't find sausages, cutlets and gingerbread to be eastern

Sausages are both eastern and western - kielbasa (kolbasa in Russian) is however eastern, cutlets are not a big part of Polish cuisine (kotlety are not cutlets) nor is gingerbread (piernik is neither gingerbread nor western). Barszcz, ogórki, the prdeominence of pork over other meats, gołabki, kasza, sledz, ser biały, kapusta kiszona, rosól z kury etc all point eastwards. Polish cuisine is essentially a variant of Russian cuisine with a few Central European influences..

And the national drink, vodka, is eastern too.

Disagree. Totally central. Just like Poland.

In Central Europe, the taste is more towards flavoured spirits - the blandest being schnapps, with vodka very secondary. The 'vodka belt' goes from Poland right through to Vladivostok. Very Eastern.


Have a look at post #14

Western.

The mentality here is much more similar to that of people from my country than Lithuania.

[quote=SeanBM] Lithuania.[/qua name ote]
What's the mentality there.
When you cut away the surplus babble, I think the West is just a Smurf word for modernity. Maybe when a Pole gets rid of his tractor and ploughs his field with a horse, he is looking eastward.

ha...

given that we generally balk at being bunched together with either Russians/Ukrainians, or Germans, or Czechs for any reason whatsoever, we're definitely Central. Hell, most Poles don't like being bunched together with other Poles...

Slavia since you didn't fully answer my question about characteristics of western and eastern mentality, I assume that since Western Europeans are


, then Eastern Europeans are loud, shameless and lazy?

Out of interest, where's here? It's hard to talk about one single set of characteristics for Poles and Poland when there's still such a marked difference in mentality between the former Russian, AustroHungarian and German zabory.

Neither - mentally they are Polish! !

Poland is as Central as it gets, and other than beer, vodka it is!


Only because it origininated in Poland and went east!

Some people say that, though millions of Russians disagree. I suspect we will never really know, however the first documented production comes from there.


And remember that Poland has moved somewhat over the years!

There was no Lithuania, it was the Soviet Union. Poland, although a puppet state of the S.U. had an element of "freedom" that Lithuania just did not get.


When we are talking about East and West, we are talking about communism/capitalism.

I found it very very difficult to live in Lithuania (man I could tell you some mad stories about that place), I find it easy to live in Poland.


Fair point, malapolska, I rekon the Russian part of the 3rd partition or Polska "B", as it's known these days, would be more difficult than here but I have only ever driven through it and stopped for fuel and food but quite a lot.

I notice a real change the further away from Warsaw and the nearer to Krakow. When you're up by hajnowka with all the wooden houses and conifer forests it could be Siberia and the people are so different from the south.


There's a lot of truth in that. East Poland since 1989 has tended to be more politically extreme than West Poland.

They are better than Eastern and western mentally, I think not fake like western,not rude like eastern.

They only believe what the Supreme Soviet tells them to believe! Wiki never lies, and they say the earliest documented vodka came from PL.


Thats a urination contest for a different thread.