Culture.pl: How It All Began

culture_spot_screen13.png, default, Still from Culture.pl's promotional spot, photo: Culture.pl, Culture.pl: How it All Began

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Articles and interviews, a database of artists and works, short films and animations, podcasts and sound walks... All this, plus special projects! Today, Culture.pl is the largest web portal devoted to Polish art and culture – read, shared and loved across the web, social media, and around the world. But it looked a little different 20 years ago, when it was founded... Let’s take a look at Culture.pl over the years!

Culture.pl first appeared on the web in July 2001, after three months of preparation – and about a year after it was founded by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (AMI), a public institution established by the Sejm to promote Polish culture around the world. From the very beginning, Culture.pl was an independent and comprehensive source of knowledge about Polish art and culture – aimed at Polish, but above all international readers. Culture.pl was created by Adam Lubomirski, who served for many years as its editor-in-chief. He and Monika Rencławowicz worked together on the concept, architecture and launch of the site.

A navy-blue page with a yellow stripe

The first version of Culture.pl was created using HTML. At this early stage, the portal’s content consisted of the calendar for Europalia (in 2001, Poland was the featured country at this international art festival) as well as one featuring cultural events organised by the AMI, along with some of the institute’s brochures. In July 2001, another calendar, featuring Polish cultural events in and outside of Poland, appeared. This quickly became the best source of information about Polish cultural events around the world – including exhibitions, concerts, festivals and performances).

Soon, Culture.pl began collaborating with external authors – art historians, critics and researchers, experts in their fields associated with institutions like the Centre for Contemporary Art, the National Museum or the Association of Polish Composers. The Artists & Works Database was started as well, and quickly became one of Culture.pl’s hallmarks.

Blue as far as the eye can see

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Previous design of Culture.pl, photo: Culture.pl

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The next version of Culture.pl, launched in June 2002, brought new graphic design and technology, using the Zope CMS. The redesign allowed not only text articles and illustrations, but also audio and video files to be shared on the site. And alongside the basic Polish and English versions, information appeared in other languages as well – French, German, Spanish – developed in tandem with projects carried out by the AMI (such as the Polish Year in Spain in 2001, in Austria in 2002, or in France in 2005). In these earlier days of the Internet age – remember, the famous Internet dictionary Wikipedia itself only appeared at the beginning of 2001 – Culture.pl quickly gained popularity and a top position in Internet search results.

The brown years

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Previous design of Culture.pl, photo: Culture.pl

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One new function of the next redesign, launched in 2008, allowed the creation of separate pages for special projects with different designs and structures – an answer to the increasing number of AMI projects. These included additional Polish Year programmes – the Polish-German Year (2005-2006), the Polish-Russian Year (2008), and the Polish Year in Israel (2008-2009). The newsletter began to be personalised; this was, of course, before the nascent social media era was being taken seriously.

Painting the site red

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Previous design of Culture.pl, photo: Culture.pl

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November 2009 saw the launch of the fourth version of the portal. Marek Zalejski, a graphic designer and the creator of many newspaper and magazine layouts (including for Rzeczpospolita and Tygodnik Powszechny), created its logo, graphics and concept. This included, amongst other things, a new structure collecting Culture’s pages, interactive functions, and photo galleries.

At the President’s request

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Previous design of Culture.pl, photo: Culture.pl

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The next big redesign debuted on 1st June 2011, when Poland held the presidency of the European Union. The Culture.pl web address (now in a ‘brick’ layout, the red design thoroughly refreshed) became, for six months, the official page of the Polish President’s cultural program – providing details about 400 cultural events in 10 world capitals.

The next evolution

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Previous design of Culture.pl, photo: Culture.pl

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Culture.pl’s next facelift was completed in November 2013, with the page presented in a revamped layout with a new structure, a more intuitive mode of navigation and updated functions.

Articles were now presented (and continue to be!) in the framework of 12 disciplines: film, theatre, visual arts, music, literature, comics, dance, architecture, photography, design, Polish cuisine and jazz. Each of these categories contained an internal division according to content type: news, artists and works, and articles. Thanks to this, it became easier to explore a given category and find articles of particular interest. Of course, if readers know what they’re looking for, they could always use the search function.

To keep up on the latest trends, Culture.pl also created its own channels on YouTube and Vimeo, where viewers can watch all of the content produced by the portal. Culture.pl has also become a rich source of images – with more than a thousand galleries of artist portraits as well as current and archival photography.

Thanks to Culture’s prime position in Internet search results, the portal serves as a valuable point of first contact with Polish culture – especially for foreign readers.

In 2015, in addition to its English and Polish sections, Culture.pl launched a Russian version of the site.

Still growing

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Culture.pl's Hompage: 20th Anniversary edition, photo: Culture.pl

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Today, Culture.pl contains more than 51,000 articles, biographies, and descriptions of artworks, institutions and events in the following languages: Polish, English, Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese (Traditional and Simplified). Thanks to its presence on social media neworks (including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest), we can quickly and efficiently reach any and all lovers of Polish culture online – including those who don’t know they are yet!

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Promo graphic for Culture.pl's Multimedia Guides to Polish Culture, photo: Culture.pl

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In June 2016, Culture.pl published its multimedia guide series A Foreigner’s Guide to Polish Culture, dedicated to film, electronic music, photography and the Polish alphabet.

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Stories from the Eastern West, photo: Culture.pl

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In August 2017, the portal’s English Section put out the first season of its podcast Stories From the Eastern West. The podcast shares ‘little-known stories from Central and Eastern Europe that changed our world’. In August 2019, it presented a podcast mini-series entitled The Final Curtain, about the fall of the Eastern Bloc. The year 2021 has so far included the launch of its Rebel Spirits mini-series, on the roots of Polish jazz.

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Cover from the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words', text: Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies, Adam Żuławski, illustration and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska, published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2018, photo: Grażyna Makara / Culture.pl

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In December 2018, a book prepared in-house by the Culture.pl team appeared: Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words. This English-language book was developed from our Poland Word by Word series and published in commemoration of Poland’s 100th anniversary of regaining its 1918 independence. Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi was written by Mikołaj Glinski, Matthew Davies and Adam Żuławski, with illustrations by Magda Burdzyńska. The project was conceived and managed by Sylwia Jabłońska.

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Where is Poland?, photo: Culture.pl

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In January 2019, Culture.pl published its multimedia guide Where Is Poland?, which allows readers to trace how Polish culture survived amid 123 years of foreign occupation. January 2019 also saw the launch of Unseen Soundwalks, Culture.pl’s first soundwalk project. Its current two seasons of walks can be accessed via the Echoes app, experiencing the walk onsite in Poland through geolocation, or in a podcast format.

At the end of 2020, Culture’s Russian section premiered Polski z Polą (Polish With Pola), a cycle of films and videos about the Polish language, offering an engaging way to learn about it as well as Poland’s history.

With thanks to our fans

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Culture.pl receives the Guarantee of Culture Award. A photograph from the official award ceremony. From left: Jan Dworak (President of the National Broadcasting Council Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji), Anna Mirkes-Radziwon (Managing Editor of the Russian section of Culture.pl), Weronika Kostyrko (Editor-in-chief of Culture.pl), Lea Berriault (Managing Editor of the English section of Culture.pl), photo: Jan Bogacz / TVP

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In 2010, Culture.pl received first place amongst Polish culture portals from Press monthly.

In 2015, the TVP Kultura television station awarded Culture.pl the ‘Gwarancja Kultury’ (Guarantee of Culture):

Text

for its thoughtful and consistent work building an online knowledge base about contemporary Polish culture at home and abroad. For its high-quality content presented in a visually appealing form. And for expanding its audience around the world by also creating Russian- and English-language versions of the portal.

Author

Trans. LD

In 2019, the book Quarks, Elephants and Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words won Most Beautiful Book of 2018 (‘Guides’ category) from the Polish Association of Book Publishers. In the same year, it won an Oustanding Book Award at the International Book Fair in Kraków.

Culture.pl reached more than 7 million readers in 2019 and more than 8 million in 2020.

The following people have served as editor-in-chief at Culture.pl:

Andrzej Lubomirski (July 2001-July 2008)
Marek Hancke (August 2008-January 2009)
Elżbieta Sawicka (February 2009-April 2012)
Weronika Kostyrko (April 2012-November 2016)
John Beauchamp (December 2016-August 2017)
Joanna Stryjczyk (September 2017-September 2019)
Marcin Pieszczyk (October 2019-present)

Originally written in Polish, Jun 2021, translated by LD, Jul 2021

Language English

culture.pl

Internet Museum

quarks elephants & pierogi: poland in 100 words

SFTEW

podcasts about Poland

polish contemporary history

20th anniversary

20 years of Culture.pl