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Poland's voivodeships are the rare set of administrative regions that are worth learning as history rather than as shapes: almost every one is named after the land it covers, and those lands are the ones Poland was assembled from. Learn where Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Silesia, Mazovia and Pomerania are and you have most of the map, in Polish as well as in English. This page is the whole set, and the game asks you to put each name where it belongs.
A województwo is Poland's top level of local government, and it is run twice over: an elected assembly with a marshal at its head does the governing, and a voivode appointed from Warsaw represents the state. The word is old, the institution is not. This particular set of them dates from 1 January 1999, when a reform replaced the 49 small voivodeships of the communist period with 16 large ones drawn to match the historical provinces. Those 49 are still visible in the country if you know where to look, because the telephone area codes were never redrawn to match.
In Polish the name is an adjective agreeing with the word województwo, which is why they all end in -skie or -ckie, and why the name on a sign is Małopolskie rather than Małopolska. Most are the adjective of a region: Wielkopolskie is Greater Poland, the cradle of the state around Poznań, and Małopolskie is Lesser Poland around Kraków, where great and lesser mean older and younger rather than bigger and smaller. Three take the name of their capital city instead, and one is named after a range of hills.
The single best clue on the ground is the number plate. Every Polish plate begins with one letter that identifies the voivodeship, followed by a district code: W is Mazowieckie, K is Małopolskie, G is Pomorskie. It is not a clean rule, since some letters come from the region and some from its capital, but it is one glance and it narrows the country to a sixteenth. Nothing else about Polish roads varies by region: the signs, the markings and the guardrails are national.
Two pairs cause most of the mistakes, and both are pairs of names rather than pairs of places. Lubusz and Lublin sound almost the same and sit at opposite ends of the country, one against Germany and one against Ukraine. Podlachian and Subcarpathian both begin with pod, which means under, and they are the northeast and southeast corners respectively: one is under the forest, the other under the mountains.
The third trap is Pomerania, which turns up in three names. Two of them are on the Baltic and one is not: Kuyavian-Pomeranian is landlocked, sitting below the other two, and carries the name because its northern half is the inland end of Pomerania along the lower Vistula.
The name in brackets is the Polish one, which is what a boundary sign, a weather map and a car registration all use, and what the game shows if you turn on the local name in the start dialog. Learning that pairing is most of the value of this map, because the English name is almost never the one you will be looking at. Each group can be played on its own from the start dialog.
A narrow voivodeship on the German border, named after the town of Lubusz, which is now on the German side of the river. It is the one people put in the east because its name is a syllable away from Lublin, which is genuinely in the east, roughly five hundred kilometres away. It also has two capitals, one for the assembly and one for the voivode.
The northeastern corner, and the one that breaks the coastal run: it touches the Baltic only at the lagoon, and what it is actually made of is the Masurian lake district and the old Prussian province of Warmia below it. Two historical lands in one name, which is a pattern worth recognising because it is how three of these were built.
The small one in the middle south, and the only one whose name comes from neither a city nor a province: it is the adjective of the Świętokrzyskie Mountains, the Holy Cross range, which are the oldest and lowest mountains in Poland. Its capital, Kielce, is not in its name at all, which is why it is hard to place from the name alone and worth learning as a shape.
The largest voivodeship by area and by population, holding Warsaw in the middle of it and a great deal of farmland around that. Because the capital sits inside rather than on the edge, this one is usually the first thing placed on the map and the anchor everything east of centre is measured from.
16, and they have covered the whole country since 1 January 1999. Before that there were 49, created in 1975, and before those 17. The 1999 reform was explicitly an attempt to go back to regions people recognised, which is why so many of the current names are historical provinces.
The top level of local government in Poland, in Polish a województwo. Each has an elected assembly with a marshal at its head, which handles regional development, roads and hospitals, and a voivode appointed by the national government, who represents the state and supervises legality. The word voivode is an old Slavic title for a war leader, and it survives here as a job in a regional administration.
Because the name is an adjective agreeing with the neuter noun województwo. Written in full it is województwo małopolskie, the Lesser Poland voivodeship, and the noun is usually dropped, leaving the adjective standing alone as the name. That is why maps and signs read Małopolskie rather than Małopolska, which is what the region itself is called.
The number plate. Every Polish plate starts with a single letter for the voivodeship and then a code for the district within it, so one letter narrows the country to a sixteenth and the pair usually names a town. There is no other regional variation to read: Polish road signs, markings, bollards and guardrails are the same nationwide.
Masovian, both by area and by population, with Warsaw inside it. Opole is the smallest on both counts. Silesian is the most densely populated by a wide margin, because it holds the Upper Silesian industrial belt, which is the largest continuous urban area in the country.
Lubusz and Lublin, which sound alike and sit at opposite borders, the German one and the Ukrainian one. Podlachian and Subcarpathian, which share a prefix and are the northeast and southeast corners. And the three names containing Pomerania, of which West Pomeranian and Pomeranian are on the Baltic in that order from the west, while Kuyavian-Pomeranian is inland below them.
More European maps in the same shape: Germany States, France Dialing Codes and Spain Dialing Codes. The 49 voivodeships this map replaced are still the shape of the country's phone numbers, which is a game of its own: Poland Dialing Codes.
