‘Twenty years of freedom’ is the motto of an open-air photo exhibition which opens in Warsaw tomorrow.

On display will be 140 photos from the archives of the Polish Press Agency documenting the events leading up to the 1989 elections which brought to an end decades of communist rule in Poland, as well as the key developments of the ensuing two decades.

The first section, entitled ‘Awakening’, recalls the birth of the anti-communist opposition, the emergence of the Solidarity movement, the imposition of martial law, the murder of the Solidarity priest Father Popiełuszko in 1984 and the first visit of Pole John Paul II thirty years ago.

The second section of the exhibition – ‘We, the people’ – is devoted entirely to the events of twenty years ago: the Round Table talks between the opposition and the communist regime, the June 1989 semi-democratic elections, the formation of the first Solidarity-led government and Lech Wałęsa’s famous address to US Congress, which opened with the words: ‘We, the people’.

The third section, entitled ‘A New Europe’, presents the democratic transformations in Central Europe which came in the wake of Polish events: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania,  and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The fourth section – ‘In our own home’ – presents glimpses of Polish developments of the last twenty years, including the opening of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, the concordat with the Holy See, the country’s entry into NATO and the European Union, to the recent meeting of the Polish president and prime minister with US President Barack Obama.

The photographs have captions in Polish and English. The Polish Press Agency has also published an album featuring all the photos, with descriptions in Polish, English, French and German.

Some of the photos are included on the Polish Press Agency’s historical website. (mk/pg)