Poland has had a complicated history. And that’s a boring historical fact. What’s not boring is how that history affected the names of all sorts of places. In certain regions of what is now Poland, people sometimes lived in three different countries, all within the span of a lifetime, and without ever leaving their home town. Each time when a place got new sovereign overlords, the first thing the new honchos did, was to impose a new national language. That in turn resulted in a change of the local name.
Anybody, who’s ever tried to research their Polish genealogy, knows how annoying this whole name changing business can be.
For example:
Hirschberg – Jelenia Góra
Allenstein – Olsztyn
Breslau – Wrocław
And the most infamous of them all: Auschwitz – Oświęcim.
