PODCAST · society
Stories From The Eastern West
by Culture.pl
Little-known histories from Central & Eastern Europe that changed our world...Heard of how The Rolling Stones played for the Communist Party? The bear who fought in WWII? Or the man who single-handedly created an entire language? Each episode of our narrative podcast tells incredible stories that all have one thing in common: the Eastern West.#SFTEW
Episodes
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CHAIN
In the very last episode of Stories of The Eastern West as you knew it, we’re taking you to Estonia, 1989. A group of people there made 2 million others hold hands and create a human chain of unprecedented size and significance. The Baltic countries had a truly turbulent 20th century. They went...
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EXILE
Get to know Piotr Szkopiak, a London-based film and TV director who’s spent a good portion of his life pondering the nature of his identity. Piotr Szkopiak was born in the United Kingdom but into a Polish family. As he grew up, he learned that his parents and neighbours were all World War II...
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REVOLUTION
Nicolaus Copernicus, born in 1473, was the orphaned son of a copper merchant in Toruń. Thanks to his bishop uncle, he obtained a first class education at the Kraków Academy and then in Italy, where he became an avid observer of the night sky – even though he was supposed to be preparing for a...
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DAISIES
Vera Chytilová was the most important woman director of the Czechoslovak New Wave – although she remains relatively unknown outside of Central Europe. As the first female student of the prestigious FAMU film school in Prague, she had to fight in order to do things her own way. During the creative...
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VISIONARY
Stanisław Lem was a science-fiction writer whose works, abilities and quirky sense of humor convinced Phillip K. Dick that he was too brilliant to exist and must have actually been a committee of people! Indeed his rare gift for blending philosophy with technology and action made him an...
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Announcing Season IV
This year we have more great stories for you! There's going to be a bit of sci-fi, a pinch of socialist realism, a good portion of astronomy, and some old-fashioned moving testimonies from a region that never sleeps! Stay tuned: the first episode drops September 7th! Like our show? Get our...
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STATELESS
In 1967, Marian Marzyński was a popular TV show host and filmmaker in Poland. But then a seemingly faraway military clash sparked an unexpected conflict within the Polish communist party that led its Jewish members to be accused of anti-Polish sentiments. The conflict developed into an…
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PUPPETS
In 1938, Hitler's forces marched into Czechoslovakia, a country that had only gained its independence two decades earlier. A puppeteer named Josef Skupa was ready to fight back with the help of Spejbl and Hurvínek – a father son duo of wooden puppets. Because the Nazi German occupiers didn't seem...
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WITNESS
Back in 2019, we got the chance to interview Anastasija Gulej. She was 95 at the time, living a happy life in one of Kyiv's suburbs. If you didn’t know her, you’d never tell be able to tell that she wakes up every day with the horrors of her past. Her past as an Auschwitz-Birkenau inmate....
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WITCHES
‘Romania today is possibly the only European country where you can bump into a witch at the supermarket.’ The history of witches in Europe is a tumultuous and violent one. Always on the margins of society and in opposition to any form of hierarchy, their presence sparked fear and prejudice which...
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LUNAR
In the summer of 1976, the late Polish film director Andrzej Żuławski, responsible for infamous cult classics such as The Devil (1972) and Possession (1981), was given a green light to shoot the most expensive film ever made in Poland. On the Silver Globe was meant to be a massively ambitious...
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ORPHANS
After the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east in 1939, many thousands of Polish families were deported to Siberian forced labour camps. There they not only faced bitter cold but constant hunger. Then Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and the families that were now allowed to leave…
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NAM
As much as The People’s Republic of Poland may seem a distant country hidden behind the Iron Curtain, it was an open and welcoming one... towards other socialist states. Student exchange programmes were one of the many ways of building international socialist partnerships. The Vietnam War was…
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SHIPYARD
In August 1980, after the firing of popular shipyard worker, Anna Walentynowicz, a strike broke out at the Vladimir Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. Suddenly this massive complex on the Polish coast, with 16,000 employees and of huge strategic importance for the Polish economy, was under worker...
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PURE
Chernobyl had cast a shadow over our childhoods. It was reportedly the cause of all the chronic diseases we’d struggled with. In the summer of 2018, we went there. We wanted to walk into the belly of the beast, to debunk any nonsense around it. To hear about the doom, catastrophes, and everyday...
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Announcing Season III
This year, we've travelled to the far reaches of the globe for you: we went deep down into the Chernobyl Exclusion zone, visited New Zealand, and went back in time and space to deliver yet another set of stories that changed our world. Stay tuned: the first episode drops July 16th! Like our show?...
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EWA & LENA
How a teen's letter to a stranger in the Soviet Union led to a long-distance friendship that has lasted decades. Like many teens growing up in the People’s Republic of Poland, Ewa decided to send a letter to a stranger in the Soviet Union. Lena from Moscow wrote back to her, and they quickly…
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KAIE
How a giant communal song festival helped Estonians regain independence from the USSR. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. In the Estonia Kaie Tanner grew up in, learning Russian at school was compulsory, and her mother and her friends often sang 'forbidden songs' at home – Estonian folk...
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PETRILA
How a Romanian mining town that lost its mine fought to turn its remains into a cultural hub. In our second and final episode on Ion Barbu and the town of Petrila, we learn how the mine, the town's main employer, was unable to achieve profitability in the new era of capitalism and was closed down...
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ION
How a Romanian miner made political caricatures at a time when making fun of the country's leadership could mean a visit from the secret police. After finishing university in 1978, Ion Barbu was assigned to the Petrila mine as a topographer. He only intended to be there briefly, but despite...
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IRYNA
How a single mother in Kyiv experienced the end of the USSR and survived the harsh economic realities of life in post-communist Ukraine in the early 1990s. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. Iryna Tkachenko is a music conservatory graduate and journalist who became a single mother just a...
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EDGAR & MICHAEL
How East Berlin's leading political cabaret tried to get their message through despite strict state censorship... and what happened when the system they were laughing at ceased to exist. For the citizens of the GDR, laughter was often the best medicine when dealing with the absurdities of the...
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TYMON
Meet the headstrong musician who's been viciously rebelling against both of the systems he lived under... and created some truly worthwhile art along the way. Tymon Tymanski came of age in the 1980s, probably the bleakest years of the communist regime. Much like teenagers in the West, he turned…
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JACEK
How a banned singer-songwriter became an unwilling musical hero through his home-copied cassettes. Jacek Kleyff was an increasingly popular topical songwriter in 1970s Poland. But he was unwilling to bend to the demands of the communist state's censorship, so the authorities reacted by banning…
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SIEGBERT
How an East German cameraman filmed the first major demonstrations in the GDR from the top of a church steeple in Leipzig. A month later, East Germany would effectively cease to exist. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. Siegbert Schefke was officially unemployed after being fired from his...
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WOJCIECH
How Polish opposition activists began transmitting their own pirate radio and 'hacked' communist-run state TV. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. Wojciech Stawiszyński was an opposition activist, who suddenly found himself in charge of running Radio Solidarność, a mobile radio station…
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CHRIS
How a photographer from London gave the rest of the world a glimpse of everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. The Polish-British photographer Chris Niedenthal found himself in the heart of Communist Poland in the 1970s and 80s, documenting both how...
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ZBIGNIEW
How a well-known opposition leader evaded capture by the communist authorities for almost five years. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. In the early 1980s, Zbigniew Bujak was the head of Solidarity in the Warsaw region, a pro-democratic labour movement that was gaining in strength. So…
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Announcing: The Final Curtain
THE FINAL CURTAIN: a new series of personal tales from the Eastern Bloc’s demise. Launching August 23rd in the Stories From The Eastern West feed! The year 1989 saw a big change. All of Central and Eastern Europe took a U-turn within less than three years and transformed from the grey land behind...
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CRACKED
Finland + technology = Nokia, doesn’t it? Yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Finland is responsible for many technological breakthroughs from the last couple decades, such as the SSH cybersecurity protocol used on over half of the world’s web servers, and Internet Relay Chat, which…
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HUNT
During WWII, the Third Reich had a systematic policy of plundering artwork from countries they invaded. In occupied Poland, this took place on a massive scale. Over half a million individual works of art were taken over the course of the war, including countless national treasures. But while some...
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TRANSMUTATION
Alchemy – the supposed ancient art of turning everyday objects into gold – is widely believed to be obsolete. Interestingly, however, every bit of this notion is wrong. First of all, as it turns out, alchemy is still being practised today and, according to one of our guests, is doing better than...
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NAKED
The German Democratic Republic was known for being one of the more politically repressive countries in the former Eastern bloc, with its Stasi secret police keeping a firm grip on any form of dissent. But it is also known for its long tradition of nude bathing – known in Germany as Free Body...
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Rabbithole Two
In this bonus episode, you’ll get to hear a song that usually doesn’t leave the thick walls of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy. If you want to know more about Grotowski, check out our two-part story about him in the episodes SEARCH and CONTINUATION. Keep up to date...
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MESMERISED
The story of a man who mesmerised half a continent... Get it on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Overcast | RSS | Direct download In 1989 the Cold War was coming to an end. Soviet Union and the whole Eastern Bloc were crumbling. There was confusion everywhere. One day…
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CONTINUATION
After having to leave Poland, Grotowski continued his ground-breaking work in the United States, before finding a permanent home in Pontedera, Italy. There he began work on Art as Vehicle, the final stage of his work at the newly-established Workcenter. This work, based around songs of tradition...
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SEARCH
Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) undoubtedly had a profound influence on the transformation of contemporary theatre over the last 40 years. Starting out as a young director in the Polish provinces, he soon realised that for theatre to reach its true potential as a communion between actor and…
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SHOETOPIA
The Czech shoe-maker Tomáš Bat'a was a visionary. A deep believer in capitalism, he dreamt up a unique functionalist city and started building it around his factories in the small town of Zlin. It became more succesful than he could have imagined. Bat’a moved on to redesigning how his workers...
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SUPERSTAR
In 1863, the 3-year-old Ignacy Jan Paderewski probably wasn’t aware that his fellow Polish countrymen were in the midst of a doomed uprising against the autocratic ruler of his homeland. But he definitely knew something was wrong when Russian Tsarist police arrested his father, dragging him away...
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Rabbithole One
Did you know that sports stars from behind the Iron Curtain pretty much competed for no money? In this little bonus episode, Władysław Kozakiewicz, the Olympic athlete from our ARM episode, tells of how he won a thousand priceless awards but very little money, and why he still loved competing.…
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ARM
Hear the pole-vaulter who offended the entire Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow explain himself. Władysław Kozakiewicz, a pole-vaulter who dominated the event for over a decade, didn’t have much luck during the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Despite being a strong favourite, he failed…
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Announcing Season II
The new season of Stories From The Eastern West is nearly here! This year, we've really stepped up our game. You'll notice we have a new theme tune, and that's just the beginning... Like our show? Sign up for our newsletter!
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CLIMB
Discover the relentless climber who changed the world's deadliest sport... In the early 1960s, a woman decided that the way men were dominating the world of mountain climbing didn’t make any sense. She went on to defy the whole community and became an icon, a trail-blazer who energised the whole...
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[BONUS] UNCLE
Learn how observing an old Christmas tradition resulted in a mystery that was never resolved. All of us at SFTEW want to thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for staying with us, listening, and for all your emails, comments and reviews. This is why we prepared this little Christmas…
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EXPERIMENTAL
Discover the Iron Curtain's unlikeliest music haven and the people who made it happen. In 1957, the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) first opened its doors in Warsaw, and would very soon become an important European centre for the creation of exciting and original electro-acoustic music.…
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REBEL
Get to know the doctor who defied prejudices, the media and the entire system to save people’s lives. In 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first successful heart transplant. This milestone achievement inspired many other clinics to successfully attempt their own...
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SPY
Throughout the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States used espionage extensively to gather information about the opposing side. To do this, they often relied on individual operatives to provide the information that technology often couldn’t. This episode will focus on one...
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BABY
Delve into the fascinating background of classic horror film Rosemary’s Baby and learn how it was made. In 1968, Rosemary’s Baby debuted in theaters and terrified unsuspecting audiences. The film was a box-office success and was widely acclaimed for its dark plot and disturbing realism. Moreover,...
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NUCLEAR
Discover how Joseph Rotblat went from creating nuclear bombs to winning the Nobel Peace prize. The American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is generally considered to be one of the most, if not the most, important events of the 20th Century. It succeeded in bringing about Japanese capitulation...
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PALACE II
Learn how a strange unwanted building became a lasting symbol of a capital city. In the first of our two-part series on Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science, our hosts discussed the post-war rebuilding of the savagely-destroyed Warsaw and the controversial origins of the palace’s construction.…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Little-known histories from Central & Eastern Europe that changed our world...Heard of how The Rolling Stones played for the Communist Party? The bear who fought in WWII? Or the man who single-handedly created an entire language? Each episode of our narrative podcast tells incredible stories that all have one thing in common: the Eastern West.#SFTEW
HOSTED BY
Culture.pl
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Stories From The Eastern West have?
Stories From The Eastern West currently has 58 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Stories From The Eastern West about?
Little-known histories from Central & Eastern Europe that changed our world...Heard of how The Rolling Stones played for the Communist Party? The bear who fought in WWII? Or the man who single-handedly created an entire language? Each episode of our narrative podcast tells incredible stories that...
How often does Stories From The Eastern West release new episodes?
Stories From The Eastern West has 58 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Stories From The Eastern West?
You can listen to Stories From The Eastern West on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Stories From The Eastern West?
Stories From The Eastern West is created and hosted by Culture.pl.
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