Origin
Poland
The shelf we are building: Polish rye vodka and hand-cut Silesian crystal
No lots held
Serving pieces from Poland
Nothing from Poland on the shelf yet. We would rather say so than pad the page out with things we do not have.
Not seeing it?
We buy from dealers and at auction worldwide, and most of what we handle never appears on a shelf at all. Tell us what you are after and we will go and look for it, say honestly whether it is worth the money, and agree our part before anything is bid.
Tell us what you are afterHow Poland came to make it
- 1405The word wodka first appears, meaning medicine rather than drink
- 1534Falimierz's herbal describes what vodka is good for
- after 1989The Polmos state monopoly is broken into regional distilleries
Poland's claim to vodka is older than the drink as we would recognise it. The word wodka appears in the court records of the Palatinate of Sandomierz in 1405, which is the earliest written use anyone has found, but it did not mean a drink: at that date it described medicines and cosmetic preparations, and the reading of the document is still argued over. What people actually drank was gorzalka, from the Old Polish gorzec, to burn.
The drink and the word met somewhere in the sixteenth century. A medicinal spirit carried from Poland is the subject of the first Cyrillic use of the word in 1533, and Stefan Falimierz's herbal of 1534 sets out what vodka was thought to be good for, which was a great deal. Distilling here was a rural and monastic business for centuries after that, consolidated into the state monopoly Polmos under the post-war government and broken back into regional distilleries after 1989.