Poznań

This week I went to Poland for a conference. The city Poznań, to which we went, was established in the 8th century. The city had a turbulent history, involved in multiple wars. Below is an image of the city in 1617 just before the Swedes invaded it (and burned and pillaged it quite extensively).

As with the rest of Poland, Poznań, was invaded, occupied, looted, recaptured and burned by a variety of other European countries (apparently this is why the rest of Europe, including the now peaceful Swedes, think of Poland as the doormat of Europe). However, the city has survived and traces of its history is a observable in its buildings and statues.

Communist architecture.

Statue commemorating the famous enigma machine (note the statistician and computational biologist to the right).

The town hall in the square with the clockwork goats, fighting every day at 12pm (again some computational biologist in the foreground).

More pictres of the old town and some computational biologists.
An interesting fact is that the farm where Carina grew up, Posen, was named after the town Poznań. Posen is the German name for Poznań. A polish citizen came to South Africa and named the farm when he owned the land. Later Carina's great-grandfather, Karel Krause, rode more than 60km with his bicycle on dirt roads to buy the farm in 1916.

Please let us know if we should continue the blog and if the material is still interresting with regular comments on our posts.

R&C