Appointments at the Presidential Palace

President Karol Nawrocki handed appointment papers to members of the Order of the White Eagle chapter (Kapituła Orderu Orła Białego) at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw on Tuesday, 13 October 2026. Two members, prof. Michał Kleiber and prof. Wojciech Roszkowski, received their papers for the next term. The third, prof. Andrzej Nowak, a respected historian from Kraków, was newly appointed to the chapter. Ministers from the Chancellery of the President, Wojciech Kolarski and Agnieszka Jędrzak, attended the ceremony alongside the chapter's members. The Chancellery said the chapter's meeting took place directly after the ceremony, with the chapter in its expanded composition.

Inaugural session of the chapter

The ceremony was followed by the chapter's inaugural session, chaired by the president as Grand Master of the Order. Members chose Michał Kleiber as Chancellor of the Order and Wojciech Roszkowski as the chapter's secretary. The chapter now has six members: the president, Kleiber, Roszkowski, Adam Bujak, Andrzej Nowak and Bronisław Wildstein. Members serve five-year terms and are picked by the president from among Knights of the Order, the oldest and most important state decoration in Poland. The chapter can propose to the president that the Order be conferred or withdrawn, and it may give opinions on all matters connected with the Order.

Who Andrzej Nowak is

Nowak is a historian and publicist who runs a unit on East European history at the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University. There he works mainly on the political history and political thought of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also leads a comparable unit at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and his interests include comparative studies of empires, cultural memory in Eastern Europe and geopolitics. He is the author of the multi-volume book series 'Dzieje Polski', published by Biały Kruk. Nowak received the Order of the White Eagle in 2019 for his achievements in the humanities and social sciences and for popularising Polish scholarly thought abroad.

Opposition activity in the 1980s

In the 1980s Nowak was active in the opposition. During martial law he co-organised the so-called Wolny Uniwersytet Jagielloński, which ran lectures on subjects banned for worker groups. He also worked with the Christian Workers' University (Chrześcijański Uniwersytet Robotniczy). He published in the underground 'Arka', where he became known as a specialist in Soviet affairs. These activities form the core of his opposition record in the sources, and they sit alongside his later academic and publishing career.