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History Lives
Adams Morgan Heritage Trail
Polish-U.S. Diplomatic Relations
When Poland declared its independence in 1918 after 123 years or foreign partition, the first prime minister of independent Poland -- Ignacy Jan Paderewski -- sent Prince Kazimierz Lubomirski to Washington as the country's first diplomatic envoy. Prince Lubomirski purchased this building from Senator John B. and Mary Foote Henderson on behalf of the Polish government.
Poland and the United States agreed to elevate their respective diplomatic missions from legations to embassies in 1930. Tytus Filipowicz, Poland's first ambassador to the United States, transformed the embassy into a thriving center of political and cultural life.
During World War II, Washington continued to recognize Poland as a sovereign nation, with Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski as Poland's representative. Ciechanowski guided the embassy through the horrors of war that claimed the live so six million Polish citizens, half of them Jews. After the war, he was forced to surrender the embassy to representatives of Poland's newly established communist government.
Over the course of 45 years of Cold War, the 10-million-strong Polish American community boycotted the embassy, protested here against the communist dictatorship, and supported the Solidarity movement in Poland. Solidarity's sweeping parliamentary victory in 1989 re-established a free and democratic Poland and re-opened a new chapter in Polish-U.S. diplomatic relations. When Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, a new chapter opened in Polish-U.S. diplomatic relations with the promise of exciting but far less dramatic times ahead for the two nations' always friendly relationship.
This historic marker was erected in 2011 to commemorate the centennial of the embassy building and the 90th anniversary of the establishment of Polish-U.S. diplomatic relations. |