Journalists from Radio Gdańsk were out early this morning in various locations across Pomerania giving out pączki, or traditional Polish, jelly-filled doughnuts.

An estimated 100 million pączki will be consumed across Poland today in celebration of Tłusty Czwartek (Fat Thursday), one of the last opportunities for feasting before the Catholic fasting period of Lent begins next Wednesday.

The average Pole eats roughly 2.5 pączki on Tłusty Czwartek, with the traditional version of the sweet treat consisting of a doughnut filled with rose jam and topped with candied bits of orange peel. Other varieties have begun to crop up in bakeries across Poland, however, including ones with chocolate or vanilla filling, and even versions that are vegan or gluten-free.

Eating pączki is thought to bring good luck, with the hopes of being able to “żyć jak pączek w maśle”, meaning “to live in luxurious comfort” over the coming year. Americans will celebrate their own version of Tłusty Czwartek next week on Fat Tuesday.

Source: culture.pl

New film by Oleg Sentsov premiers in Berlin

Former political prisoner and award-winning Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov recently premiered his new film, “Numbers” at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin.

According to Deutsche Welle, the film is a parody of modern society in which a group of people living under a totalitarian system have numbers instead of names and are forced to follow a series of strict and seemingly arbitrary rules.

While presumably serving as a critique of current and past Russian regimes, Sentsov argues that the play upon which the film was based “is not only about Russia” but about “the universal theme of a self-contained society”.

Sentsov has garnered a great deal of praise for his previous works and political activism. He received a Neptun award from the City of Gdańsk last year for his artistic achievements in support of the values of freedom and solidarity, and was later awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Sentsov was arrested in 2014 on the charges of conducting terrorist activities in Crimea, and was released in September 2019 as part of a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia.

The film was largely completed while Sentsov was still imprisoned in Russia and is scheduled to be screened at the 70th annual Berlin International Film Festival. The festival opens today and runs until Sunday, March 1st.

Source: Deutsche Welle

Success for Polish-Brazilian tennis team

Poland’s Łukasz Kubot and Brazil’s Marcelo Melo have advanced to the quarter-finals of the men’s doubles at the Rio Open tennis tournament in Brazil.

The pair easily defeated their Hungarian-Brazilian opponents in two sets yesterday, 6-3, 7-5, to move up in the tournament rankings. In their bid for a place in the semi-finals, Kubot and Melo will take on the Czech-Slovak duo of Roman Jebavý and Igor Zelenay later today, with the match set to start at 20:00 CET tonight.

In 2017, Kubot and Melo were named the men’s doubles team of the year by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and are currently seeded number 2 in the Rio Open.

Source: Radio Poland

Update: 10-year-old Gdynia boy not abducted

Belgian court documents have shown that a 10-year-old boy from Gdynia who was the subject of yesterday’s “child alert” was not abducted by his father.

Reports initially stated that the the boy, identified as “Ibrahim,” had been violently taken from a residence in Gdynia on Sunday by his father, reportedly a Moroccan citizen living in Belgium. As later evidence proved, however, this was not the case.

In a judgment issued in October 2018, the Belgian court awarded dual custody to both parents but determined the place of residency for the child was with his father in Belgium. Accordingly, the father did not abduct his son as was mistakenly reported by Polsat and other news sources yesterday.

According to Radio Gdańsk reporter Grzegorz Armatowski, an inquiry is still ongoing into the mother’s reported injuries, but the District Prosecutor’s Office in Gdynia is not pursuing any abduction charges.

For updates on the case, stay tuned to radiogdansk.pl or follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/RadioGdanskNews

Weather

Today will be partly cloudy and and slightly breezy with a potential for some light rain in the afternoon. Temperatures will peak around 7°C, or 45°F before dropping to 3°C or 37°F overnight. Clouds and a chance for rain will also return tomorrow morning, with similar weather continuing on into the weekend.

RG News/Elizabeth Peck