By Miłosz Manasterski
Whenever I land at Zvartnots Airport on a flight from Warsaw, I feel an extraordinary surge of energy despite the exhaustion of a red-eye flight. There is something genuinely warm in the demeanor of the ground staff and border guards in Yerevan that makes me feel instantly welcome. I have often wondered whether this is due to my burgundy Polish passport or simply the legendary Armenian hospitality. Would I experience the same warmth if I arrived as a German, an Italian, or a Spaniard? I will never know.
I do know, however, what I feel as a Pole.
If you grow up along the Vistula, you encounter Armenian heritage almost by default. To many Poles, Armenians are not an exotic people living far away in the Caucasus, near the Iranian border. They are one of the historic communities that helped shape Poland’s cultural and political landscape.
For centuries, Polish Armenians contributed to trade, diplomacy, religion, science, and the arts. Their presence became part of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and of modern Poland. Their legacy lives on in figures whose achievements became part of Poland’s national heritage: Józef Teodorowicz, the Armenian Catholic Archbishop of Lviv and an important religious and political figure of the Second Polish Republic; Teodor Axentowicz, one of Poland’s leading painters of the Young Poland movement and rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków; Zbigniew Herbert, one of Poland’s greatest poets, whose family tradition traced Armenian ancestry; and Ignacy Łukasiewicz, the pioneer of the modern oil industry, whose family origins were connected to the Armenian community.
For many Poles, these names are not reminders of a distant minority community. They are simply part of the national story. Today, Armenians in Poland are often our colleagues, neighbors, entrepreneurs, and friends. Their presence is not a foreign addition to Polish history, but one of the threads that have shaped it.
