Lehistan Stories · Episode 1
The envoy from Lehistan
For 123 years Poland was missing from the map. The Ottoman court, the story goes, kept asking whether its envoy had arrived.
1795–1923 · 72 s
The story
For a hundred and twenty-three years, Poland was missing from the map of Europe.
And yet, the story goes, at audiences of the Ottoman court someone would ask whether the envoy from Lehistan had arrived.
The answer was always the same: not yet.
Lehistan: the Ottoman name for Poland.
It is the best-loved story in Polish–Turkish history.
Historians have never been able to trace it to a document.
What stands behind it is on record.
When Polish uprisings failed, the Ottoman Empire took in their exiles.
In 1842 they founded a village on Ottoman soil: Adampol, today Polonezköy.
In 1849 the Sultan's government refused Russian and Austrian demands to hand over Polish and Hungarian refugees.
General Józef Bem became Murad Pasha.
In 1923 a reborn Poland and the new Turkish state signed a Treaty of Friendship.
The envoy from Lehistan had finally arrived.
What is documented, and what is told
The question at the Ottoman court is a story: historians have never found it in a document. What stands behind it is on record: the exiles received after the uprisings, Adampol (1842), the refusal of 1849 to hand over Polish and Hungarian refugees, and the Treaty of Friendship of 1923.
Sources
- TURKPOL, The envoy from Lehistan
- Treaty of Friendship between Poland and Turkey, Lausanne, 23 July 1923 (Dz.U. 1924 nr 3)
- Marzanna Pomorska, Maciej Kwaśniewski, Za co Polacy kochają Turcję / Polonyalılar Türkiye'yi neden sever (2023)
Credits and rights
The stories draw on Za co Polacy kochają Turcję / Polonyalılar Türkiye'yi neden sever by Marzanna Pomorska and Maciej Kwaśniewski (2023). The book is its authors' work: we tell the stories in our own words, check every fact independently and reproduce none of its text or pages.
Historical paintings are in the public domain. Each is credited with its artist, collection and source.
Archive pictures
- Enthronement ceremony of Selim III, Konstantin Kapıdağlı, Topkapı Palace (public domain)
- The embassy of Jan Gniński to Istanbul, 1679, Pierre Paul Sevin (public domain)
- Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Paul Delaroche (public domain)
- Józef Bem, Józef Szymon Kurowski, 1832 (public domain)
Scenes marked "Illustration" are AI-generated and show no real people. The voice-over and the music were produced with AI tools.
The films and texts are © TURKPOL, shared under the Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 licence: you may share and adapt them for non-commercial purposes, crediting "TURKPOL, Lehistan Stories" with a link to this page.
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0 · For any other use, write to info@turkpol.org.pl.