Stories From The Eastern West
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Stories From The Eastern West
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 sto...
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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 othe...
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.
Pio...
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...
DAISIES
Vera Chytilová was the most important woman director of the Czechoslovak New Wave – although she remains relatively unknown outside of Central Europe....
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 exi...
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...
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 confli...
PUPPETS
In 1938, Hitler's forces marched into Czechoslovakia, a country that had only gained its independence two decades earlier. A puppeteer named Josef Sku...
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 kno...
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...
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...
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 th...
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 othe...
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...
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, w...
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...
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 t...
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...
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...
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.
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 1...
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 th...
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...
JACEK
How a banned singer-songwriter became an unwilling musical hero through his home-copied cassettes.
Jacek Kleyff was an increasingly popular top...
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...
WOJCIECH
How Polish opposition activists began transmitting their own pirate radio and 'hacked' communist-run state TV. Part of our mini-series The Final Curta...
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 Curtai...
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.
...
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!
CRACKED
Finland + technology = Nokia, doesn’t it? Yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Finland is responsible for many technological breakthroughs fro...
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 massi...
TRANSMUTATION
Alchemy – the supposed ancient art of turning everyday objects into gold – is widely believed to be obsolete. Interestingly, however, every bit of thi...
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...
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 i...
MESMERISED
The story of a man who mesmerised half a continent...
Get it on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Overcast | RSS | Direct...
CONTINUATION
After having to leave Poland, Grotowski continued his ground-breaking work in the United States, before finding a permanent home in Pontedera, Italy....
SEARCH
Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) undoubtedly had a profound influence on the transformation of contemporary theatre over the last 40 years.
Starting...
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 ar...
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 t...
ARM
Hear the pole-vaulter who offended the entire Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow explain himself.
Władysław Kozakiewicz, a pole-vaulter...