Places

There is a region at the Warta river where, until recently, you could visit New York, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia within one day. Before 1945, the area had villages with such exotic names as Jamaica, Ceylon or Hampshire. The origins of those names are unclear, but a number of hypotheses have been made. According to one of them, when the King of Prussia, Frederick II, was bringing settlers to the freshly drained floodplains of the Warta river at the end of the 18th century, he wanted as much publicity for the enterprise as possible. The king boasted that he expanded the borders of his dominion without violence, or even discovered new lands for his nation.