Sułoszowa, a Polish village of around 6,000 people located in the Olkuska Upland, less than 30 km northwest of Kraków, has been dubbed ‘Little Tuscany’ because of its unusual layout.

The village of Sułoszowa has been around for many years, but it only recently started attracting international attention after bird’s eye photos and videos went viral on social media. Millions of people around the world were mesmerized by the unusual layout of the rural settlement – hundreds of houses on either side of a singular street, snaking through multi-colored agricultural fields as far as the eye can see. Every one of the 5.819 inhabitants – according to a 2017 census – lives on the same street, which stretches for over 9 kilometers.

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With a nearly perfect 4.9/5.0 stars out of thousands of Google reviews, Gacek, an overweight black-and-white street cat, is the top-rated tourist attraction in the Polish city of Szczecin.

Szczecin, a medieval city in northwestern Poland, close to the border with Germany, has plenty to offer visitors. The Pomeranian Duke’s Castle and Kasprowicza Park are two of its most popular tourist attractions, but when it comes to online reviews, both pale in comparison with the city’s top-rated attraction, a fat cat named Gacek. The tuxedo cat rose to fame in 2020, after local news site wSzczecinie featured the feline in a video that subsequently went viral on social media, and people have been showering Gacek with positive reviews ever since.

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A popular gym in Krakow, Poland, managed to stay open under new coronavirus restrictions by declaring itself a shop where people can “test” equipment for a fee, and a church offering “religious meetings” to promote a healthy lifestyle.

Over the weekend, Krakow police entered the “Atlantic Sports Fitness Gym Squash Klub” fitness center where a dozen or so people were exercising despite the government ban on gyms designed to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Officers ID-ed both the staff and the visitors, but didn’t issue any fines, because representatives of the gym claimed that they were operating legally. Because the firm already has a business classification allowing it to carry out retail services, Atlantic Sports declared itself a shop where people could come in and test fitness equipment for a fee.

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A farmer who refused to sell his land on the outskirts of the Polish city of Lublin to apartment building developers continues to harvest crops using combines and tractors under the surprised gazes of his new neighbors.

Imagine living in an urban apartment and looking out the window to see a huge combine plowing through a field of wheat or maize? That’s the view that residents on Jantarowa street, in the Polish city of Lublin, are treated to every summer or fall. Apparently, while most land owners in the area sold their farmland to residential building developers, one farmer refused to budge, so the apartment building were built around his property, where he continues to farm every year.

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Dozens of die-hard car racing fans found an ingenious way to support their favorite drivers while also abiding social distancing rules – they rented 21 construction cranes and watched the race from above the race track arena.

Sunday is race day at Stadion Żużlowy Motor Lublin in the Polish city of Lublin, but because of the Covid -19 pandemic, the arena wasn’t full to the brink as it usually is. Social distancing rules dictate that sport venues fill up at only 25 percent capacity, but a few dozen fans found a way to be close to the action without actually setting foot in the arena. They rented 21 construction cranes and lifted themselves up above the stadium in groups of three or four. Photos of them standing on platforms and holding flares have been doing the rounds on the internet.

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A 25-year-old woman from Poland has been left completely blind in her right eye and with eyesight complications in the left one after having her eyeballs dyed black by a tattoo artist in order to make herself stand out.

Aleksandra Sadowska’s tragic story began four years ago, when the young girl from Wroclaw, in western Poland, decided to get her eyeballs dyed black. She searched online for someone who could do the procedure, and found a willing tattoo artist from Warsaw. Although the tattoo artist, referred to by Polish press as Piotr A., appeared to know what he was doing, he allegedly didn’t know his craft very well, which led to a botched dying procedure. Aleksandra started complaining of severe pain in her eyes shortly after the procedure, but the tattoo artist allegedly told her that it was normal and recommended that she use painkillers to cope. Unfortunately, her situation was much more serious…

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A Polish man who was allegedly blind for twenty years, miraculously recovered his vision after being hit by a car while crossing the street.

Until a couple of years ago, Janusz Goraj, from the city of Gorzow Wielkopolski, was completely blind in his left eye, and could only discern shadows and light with his right one. He had lost his eyesight 20 years ago, as a side-effect of severe allergies, and had become accustomed to living in almost total darkness. But one day in 2018, a miracle happened. Janusz was crossing the street on a crosswalk when he was violently hit by a car. He hit his head on the car’s hood as well as on the asphalt as he fell. To make matters worse, he also damaged his hip, and ended up needing surgery on it. But little did he know that the accident was a blessing in disguise.

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Miejsce Odrzańskie, a small village in southern Poland, near the border with the Czech Republic, is offering to reward the first local family to give birth to a son. None have been born there in the last nine years, and the youngest one that still lives in the village is 12-years-old.

No one knows why, but couples in Miejsce Odrzańskie rarely have boys. Most of the 300 or so inhabitants are women, and locals say it’s been this way for as long as they can remember. Mayor Rajmund Frischko recently told Polish reporters that after checking historical records and reviewing registered birth certificates he can confirmed that rare male births are not just a recent anomaly. He has also pledged to reward the first couple to give birth to a boy.

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It’s crazy what people these days will do for a bit of attention and some social media followers. Julia Słońska, a young model and online influencer with over 6,000 followers on Instagram, was widely criticized after a viral video shot by a friend showed her smashing the nose of a 200-year-old statue with a hammer.

Słońska has been forced to issue a grovelling apology after a video of her smashing the nose of a post-war statue in Warsaw received massive criticism online. Posted as a story by fellow Instagram user @advvx, the shocking video shows the young model holding a hammer and asking the person behind the camera if they are filming before proceeding to smash the statue’s nose to smithereens. The pair then continue to laugh as they walk away leaving the now-noseless statue to be discovered by local authorities. Although Słońska has yet to reveal the motivation behind this act of vandalism, it is believed to have been a stunt meant to attract social media followers.

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Catholic priests from an evangelical group in northern Poland recently sparked a heated online debate after staging a controversial protest against occultism, idolatry and sorcery by burning various “sacrilegious” items, including Harry Potter and Twilight books, traditional masks and idols, and even a Hello Kitty umbrella.

In photos posted on Facebook, several priests from the SMS from Heaven Foundation, in Koszalin, Poland, can be seen carrying baskets full of items they consider sacrilegious from their church to a stone fire area outside and setting them ablaze. Footage shows an African wooden mask, a small Buddhist figure, figurines of elephants and popular fantasy books like Harry Potter and Twilight being consumed by flames as the priests and a few altar boys watch. The objects were reportedly brought in by parishioners, who were encouraged by the priests to clean their homes of such evil items.

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A football match between two teams from Poland’s third division received a lot of international attention last week, not for the quality of the football displayed by the players, but for the appalling conditions in which fans of the visiting team had to watch the game. Shocking photos show a group of supporters crammed in a large metal cage that some media outlets described as a human zoo.

Last week, around 100 supporters of Hutnik Krakow accompanied their team for an away game against Spartakus Daleszyce, in the Polish third football division, and found themselves locked in a large metal cage for the entire 90-minute game. According to Polish rules, supporters of the away team must be kept separated from fans of the team hosting the game, but they usually end up in an isolated sector of the stadium, or in a seating area divided by a high fence, to avoid violent clashes. However, Spartakus Daleszyce, is one of several Polish teams that have opted to keep away fans in metal cages. The controversial structure has actually been around for years, but it only recently attracted attention after photos posted on a popular Polish football fan website went viral online.

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A Polish mountain climber who recently scaled his country’s highest peak was surprised to find a domestic cat waiting for him at the very top.

Wojciech Jabczynski couldn’t believe his eyes when he reached the top of the 2,500-meter-high Rysy mountain and spotted a ginger cat nonchalantly licking its paws. No one knows exactly how the feline got to the mountain top, or why, but Jabczynski suspects it may have climbed up from a small tourist hut under the peak. Surprised by its presence there, the experienced climber took out his phone and took some pictures and recorded a video, just to make sure people believed him when he told the story.

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25-year-old Tomasz Nadolski, from Wroclaw, Poland,  suffers from a rare and cruel disease that has not only made his life a living hell, but also left him stuck in the underdeveloped body of a 12-year-old boy.

Tomasz’s health problems began when he was only 7-years-old. He would throw up after every meal and experience excruciating pain in his stomach, hands and feet. Because he couldn’t keep any food down, he lost a lot of weight and kids at school started teasing him about looking like a walking skeleton. For years, doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, and some of them even claimed that his problems were mental rather than physical. It took 16 years for Tomasz’s condition to finally be diagnosed, but, unfortunately, knowing what he was suffering from didn’t make the young man’s life any better.

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Polish environmental group EkoLogiczna recently had to pay a massive phone bill, after the SIM card in a GPS tracker they put on the back of a white stork, so it could collect data about the bird’s winter migration route, got stolen.

In April 2017, members of EkoLogiczna fit Kajtek, a white stork, with a GPS tracker so they could monitor his migration route to Africa, as well as his feeding habits. In the next year, the bird flew around 6,000 km and EkoLogiczna was able to collect the data they wanted, but in February of this years, something weird happened. On his way back from Africa to Poland, Kajtek stopped in Sudan, and “for unknown reasons” remained in the area for over two months, “travelling 25 kms in different directions during the day”. Then, on April 26, they lost the signal completely.

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After making a daring escape while being loaded on a truck headed for the slaughterhouse, a cow in Nysa, Poland, swam to an uninhabited island on a nearby lake and has been living there ever since.

Cows are among the most obedient of domestic animals, but when their survival instincts kick in, they can pull of some truly extraordinary things. Just last month, we wrote another cow in Poland that escaped her farm and went on to join a heard of bison at the edge of the primeval Bialowieza Forest, and earlier this month we featured Hermien, a plucky cow from the Netherlands, that escaped just as her owner was sending her to the slaughterhouse and hid in the woods for over six weeks. Now, we’re heading back to Poland, where another brave cow is making news headlines for her will to survive.

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