Essential Polish phrases

Good day and goodbye. Said on entering and leaving a shop, a lift or a doctor's waiting room. Silence reads as rudeness rather than reserve.

Sir / madam, and the grammatical subject of the sentence. Polish has no neutral 'you', so every sentence commits you to formal or informal.

Your national identification number. Nothing digital in Poland works without it — tax, NFZ, e-government, most banking.

The government digital identity. Since April 2026 you cannot file a residence application without one, and the fastest way to get it is your bank's app.

Occasional tenancy — the standard Polish private lease. It requires a notarial declaration submitting to eviction and removes protections you would otherwise have.

The lump-sum tax on revenue that most Polish IT contractors elect — 12% for software development. The choice is annual and the deadline is unforgiving.

The 'flood of the millennium', July 1997, which put much of Wrocław under water. Locals date the city into before and after, and it still shapes what certain districts cost.

One of the several hundred bronze dwarfs hidden around the city. They descend from the Orange Alternative, the surrealist anti-communist street movement of the 1980s that started here.

Cathedral Island, the oldest part of the city. A lamplighter still lights its gas lamps by hand every evening at dusk.

The city's German name until 1945. Wrocław's population was almost entirely replaced after the war, much of it by people expelled from Lwów — which is why the Ossolineum and the Racławice Panorama are here.

112 for any emergency from any phone, in Polish or English. 999 goes directly to an ambulance dispatcher.