and
Ludwik Solski on Polskie Radio, 1949 Polskie Radio was founded on 18 August 1925 and began making regular broadcasts from
Warsaw on 18 April 1926. Before the
Second World War, Polish Radio operated one national channel – broadcast from 1931 from one of Europe's most powerful
longwave transmitters situated at
Raszyn (just outside
Warsaw) and destroyed in 1939 due to invasion of
German Army. Polskie Radio was also broadcast on nine regional stations -
Kraków from 15 February 1927,
Poznań from 24 April 1927, and
Katowice from 4 December 1927.
Wilno joined the network from 15 January 1928. In 1930, regional stations broadcast from
Lwów from 15 January 1930 and from
Łódź from 2 February 1930.
Toruń followed from 15 January 1935, with
Warszawa broadcasting from 1 March 1937 – known as Warszawa II, the national channel becoming Warszawa I from this date.
Baranowicze finally broadcast as the ninth regional station from 1 July 1938. A tenth regional station was planned for
Łuck, but the outbreak of war meant that it never opened. Out of notable people for the time,
Czesław Miłosz, recipient of the 1980
Nobel Prize in Literature, worked as a literary programmer at
Polish Radio Wilno in 1936. The
invasion of Poland by
Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union led to the destruction of the network in September 1939, with its final broadcast being a performance of
Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. posth. by
Władysław Szpilman. Years later, Szpilman played the same piece for the reopening of the station. Polskie Radio Trójka has been compiling Polish music charts since 1982 – in an era before there were any commercial sales or airplay rankings – making them a significant record of musical popularity in Poland. Chart archives dating from 1982 are available to the public via the station's website. After the war, Polskie Radio was reconstructed with the assistance of the Soviet
Red Army, which valued radio as a propaganda medium. == Channels ==