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.
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 stories that all have one thing in common: the Eastern West. #SFTEW
Episodes
September 1, 2022 • 25 mins
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 others hold hands and create a human chain of unprecedented size and significance.
The Baltic countries had a truly turbulent 20th century. They went from regaining their independence to losing it to the USSR and becoming subject to a ruthless policy of Ru...
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December 17, 2021 • 25 mins
Piotr Szkopiak was born in the United Kingdom but into a Polish family. As he g...
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November 10, 2021 • 30 mins
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 at the Kraków Academy and then in Italy, where he became an avid observer of the night sky – even though he was supposed to be preparing for a church career.
His day job as a church canon, diplomat and doctor in Frombork – when he wasn't defending castles against the Teutonic Knights...
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October 7, 2021 • 26 mins
Vera Chytilová was the most important woman director of the Czechoslovak New Wave – although she remains relatively unknown outside of Central Europe. As the first female student of the prestigious FAMU film school in Prague, she had to fight in order to do things her own way. During the creative explosion of the Czechoslovak New Wave, she made her most well known film ‘Daisies’ (1966) – a surrealist pop-art comedy, about two young...
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September 7, 2021 • 27 mins
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 exist and must have actually been a committee of people! Indeed his rare gift for blending philosophy with technology and action made him an instantaneously recognisable voice in t...
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August 24, 2021 • 1 min
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 old-fashioned moving testimonies from a region that never sleeps!
Stay tuned: the first episode drops September 7th!
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March 31, 2021 • 28 mins
In 1967, Marian Marzyński was a popular TV show host and filmmaker in Poland. But then a seemingly faraway military clash sparked an unexpected conflict within the Polish communist party that led its Jewish members to be accused of anti-Polish sentiments. The conflict developed into an anti-Semitic campaign that affected all of Polish Jew...
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March 1, 2021 • 24 mins
In 1938, Hitler's forces marched into Czechoslovakia, a country that had only gained its independence two decades earlier. A puppeteer named Josef Skupa was ready to fight back with the help of Spejbl and Hurvínek – a father son duo of wooden puppets. Because the Nazi German occupiers didn't seem to take puppets very seriously, Skupa's th...
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January 27, 2021 • 25 mins
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 know her, you’d never tell be able to tell that she wakes up every day with the horrors of her past. Her past as an Auschwitz-Birkenau inmate.
Anastasija was already ...
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December 31, 2020 • 24 mins
‘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 tumultuous and violent one. Always on the margins of society and in opposition t...
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November 30, 2020 • 35 mins
In the summer of 1976, the late Polish film director Andrzej Żuławski, responsible for infamous cult classics such as The Devil (1972) and Possession (1981), was given a green light to shoot the most expensive film ever made in Poland. On the Silver Globe was meant to be a massively ambitious science-fiction epic set on the Moon, showing the birth of a new civilisation, and produced without the benefit of modern special effects. Bu...
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October 31, 2020 • 33 mins
After the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east in 1939, many thousands of Polish families were deported to Siberian forced labour camps. There they not only faced bitter cold but const...
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September 30, 2020 • 28 mins
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 other socialist states. Student exchange programmes were one of the many ways of building international socialist partnerships.
The Vietnam War was just ending when Hai ‘Nam’ Bui Ngoc had reached university. He was one of the few lucky ones given a chance to travel to the other side of th...
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August 31, 2020 • 29 mins
In August 1980, after the firing of popular shipyard worker, Anna Walentynowicz, a strike broke out at the Vladimir Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. Suddenly this massive complex on the Polish coast, with 16,000 employees and of huge strategic importance for the Polish economy, was under worker occupation, and every day other workplaces in Gdańs...
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July 16, 2020 • 31 mins
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, we went there.
We wanted to walk into the belly of the beast, to debunk any nonsense around it. To hear about the doom, catastrophes, and everyday struggles.
But what we came back with was something else entirely – a beautiful and uplifting tale...
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July 8, 2020 • 1 min
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 back in time and space to deliver yet another set of stories that changed our world.
Stay tuned: the first episode drops July 16th!
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November 1, 2019 • 14 mins
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 the People’s Republic of Poland, Ewa decided to send a letter to a stranger in the Soviet Union. Lena from Moscow wrote back to her, and they quickly found they had a lot in common, including a lov...
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October 25, 2019 • 18 mins
How a giant communal song festival helped Estonians regain independence from the USSR. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain.
In the Estonia Kaie Tanner grew up in, learning Russian at school was compuls...
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October 18, 2019 • 21 mins
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 the town of Petrila, we learn how the mine, the to...
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October 11, 2019 • 19 mins
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.
After finishing university in 1978, Ion Barbu was assigned to...
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