Qualla: Pol'and'Rock Festival

Pol'and'Rock Festival: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich), CC BY 4.0. The name came from a television show. In the mid-1990s Poland was watching Northern Exposure, retitled for local broadcast as Przystanek Alaska — Alaska Station — and it was enormously popular. So when Jerzy Owsiak came home from the twenty-fifth-anniversary Woodstock festival in New York State with an idea, the thing he founded in 1995 was called Przystanek Woodstock: Woodstock Station. A place you stop at rather than buy your way into. Three decades and several addresses later it has never once charged admission, it has drawn crowds of three-quarters of a million, and for sixteen summers its address was a set of flat fields on the Polish-German border outside Kostrzyn nad Odrą.

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Image: Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich) | CC BY 4.0

Pol'and'Rock Festival: Love, Friendship, Music

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Macielelek, CC0. That is the official motto, and the economics behind it are unusual enough to explain a lot. The festival is staged by the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity, Poland's enormous annual fundraising drive, as a thank-you to the volunteers who make the collection happen. Nobody is ...

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Image: Macielelek | CC0

Pol'and'Rock Festival: Czymanowo, Szczecin, Żary

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jakkolwiek, CC BY-SA 3.0. The first edition ran on 15 and 16 July 1995 at Czymanowo near Gnewin, by Żarnowieckie Lake, with Carrantouhill, Skankan, Żuki, Myslovitz, Ira and Urszula playing and no alcohol sold at all — a rule inherited from the legendary Jarocin festivals. Szczecin-Dąbie hosted 1996, where...

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Image: Jakkolwiek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pol'and'Rock Festival: Sixteen Summers on the Oder

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich), CC BY 3.0. From 2004 the fields north of Kostrzyn nad Odrą took over, and the scale became genuinely difficult to picture. Over 400,000 people came in 2009. In 2011 attendance passed 700,000; 2012 drew around 550,000 and 2013 around 500,000; 2014 set a record at roughly 750,000, matched aga...

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Image: Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich) | CC BY 3.0

Pol'and'Rock Festival: The Academy of Finest Arts

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich), CC BY 3.0. Between the sets, something less predictable runs alongside. The Akademia Sztuk Przepięknych — the Academy of Finest Arts — puts young audiences in front of politicians, writers, film-makers and clergy for open panel discussions, and the guest list reads like a cross-section of P...

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Image: Ralf Lotys (Sicherlich) | CC BY 3.0

Pol'and'Rock Festival: New Name, New Address

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jakkolwiek, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 8 March 2018 the festival changed its name to Pol'and'Rock, the result of a licensing dispute with the agency representing Michael Lang, one of the promoters of the original Woodstock. The replacement carries its own argument — rock and roll on one side, Poland's democratic an...

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Image: Jakkolwiek | CC BY-SA 3.0