On the occasion of All Saints' Day we visited Polish cemeteries in Tanzania
01.11.2024
To mark All Saints' Day, the Embassy's chargée d'affairs a.i. Katarzyna Sobiecka and the Head of Administration and Finance Edgar Klusa laid flowers on the graves of compatriots at Kinondoni Cemetery in Dar es Salaam. The Consul of the Republic of Poland Wojciech Łysak visited the Polish necropolis in Ifunda near Iringa, and the Vice Consul Krystyna Fatyga visited the graves of Poles in Bigwa near Morogoro.
The Polish Embassy in Dar es Salaam takes care of five necropolises in Tanzania where there are graves of Poles, as well as a dozen of Polish gravestones in the municipal cemetery in Dar es Salaam. A total of over two hundred of our compatriots have been buried in all these cemeteries. They were mostly civilians accompanying General W. Anders' Army during its journey from the Soviet Union to Iran and Palestine. The soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces in the USSR went to the battlefront, while the civilians were transported and settled in British colonies and territories, including the one that used to be known as Tanganyika and is the nowadays Tanzania. Here, they have established Polish settlements, the largest of which was in Tengeru (about 5 000 inhabitants), near the town of Arusha. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a number of them emigrated to the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries, but some have remained in Tanzania.
Between 2018 and 2021, thanks to the collaboration between the Centre for Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions, and Resettlements of the University of the National Education Commission (Krakow), the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Embassy of Poland in Dar es Salaam, the renovation or refreshment of all Polish graves in cemeteries across Tanzania were successfully carried out. All necropolises are regularly refurbished as per need, tidied up and visited by staff of the Polish Embassy in Dar es Salaam. Earlier this year, in August, Vice Consul Krystyna Fatyga, together with Polish participants in the World Esperanto Congress, visited the cemetery in Tengeru.
