24 August 2026·TURKPOL Editorial
Poland and Türkiye have been talking to each other for more than six hundred years. In 1414, King Władysław II Jagiełło sent envoys to the court of Sultan Mehmed I — the first documented Polish embassy to the Ottomans, and the date both governments used when they marked six centuries of relations in 2014.
That longevity is unusual, and the reason is geography. Poland and Türkiye have never shared a border. Neither has ever occupied the other's capital. What lay between them — Hungary, the Danube, the Black Sea steppe — was contested by both, which meant they had every reason to keep a channel open and rarely any reason to close it permanently.
From embassy to treaty
The fifteenth-century contacts became something more formal in 1533, when Sigismund I the Old and Suleiman the Magnificent concluded a treaty of perpetual peace. "Perpetual" was optimistic — the two states fought later — but the document set a pattern that held: periods of rivalry punctuated by deliberate, negotiated returns to normal relations.
The single most-cited episode is the one where they were on opposite sides. In 1683, Jan III Sobieski led the relief force at Vienna against an Ottoman army under Kara Mustafa Pasha. It is remembered very differently in Warsaw and in Istanbul — a subject we take up separately in Vienna 1683: one battle, two national memories.
The century Poland was not on the map
Between 1795 and 1918, Poland did not exist as a state. The Ottoman Empire's conduct in that period is the reason the relationship carries so much warmth today. It sheltered Polish political emigrants, declined to hand them back when Russia and Austria demanded it, and allowed a Polish village to be founded on its territory in 1842 — Adampol, today Polonezköy.
A relationship is best measured not when it is convenient but when one side has nothing left to offer.
Polish officers entered Ottoman service; the most prominent, General Józef Bem, became Murad Pasha. The poet Adam Mickiewicz died in Istanbul in 1855 while trying to raise a Polish legion. The connection in that century was not between two states — there was only one state — but between a government and a nation without one.
Two republics, one alliance
Both countries emerged from the First World War remade. Poland regained independence in 1918; the Republic of Türkiye was proclaimed in 1923. That same year, on 23 July, the two signed a Treaty of Friendship at Lausanne — one of the young Republic's earliest bilateral agreements.
The rest is the architecture of the present. Türkiye joined NATO in 1952, Poland in 1999; both are now bound by the same Article 5 commitment, as we discuss in Two allies: Poland and Türkiye in European security. Poland joined the European Union in 2004, which placed it on the EU side of the 1995 EU–Türkiye Customs Union that governs most of the trade between them.
Why the anniversary is not just ceremony
Six hundred years of contact produce something a treaty cannot: familiarity. It is why a Turkish family settling in Warsaw finds a Polish word for coffee that came from Turkish, and why the Turkish name for Poland — Lehistan — is a Polish word that travelled the other way. Those traces are the subject of Words that travelled.
TURKPOL exists to keep that thread usable rather than ceremonial. If you want the full chronology, see the cultural ties timeline; if you want to take part, start with membership.