POLES AT home and around the world celebrated the 90th anniversary yesterday of their country's return to the map of Europe after 123 years divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria.
Red and white flags fluttered around Warsaw as people laid flowers at the statue of Gen Józef Pilsudski, whose release from German captivity and return to the Polish capital on November 11th, 1918, is celebrated as Polish independence day.
Just two decades later, the country was occupied again by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the second World War began. After nearly half a century as a Soviet satellite, independence - and the November 11th anniversary celebration - was restored in 1989.
Yesterday, more than a dozen heads of state, including Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel, joined President Lech Kaczynski in Warsaw for a military parade.
"Fighting on many fronts, for over three years, we managed it ourselves. Nobody handed [sovereignty] to us," said Mr Kaczynski, calling the occasion a "day of joy".
"Today, our country is developing. We have realised our strategic goals, to enter Nato and enter the European Union."
A gala ceremony at Warsaw's Opera House was overshadowed by controversy after Mr Kaczynski declined to invite Lech Walesa, the leader of the pro-democracy Solidarity movement and later Poland's first democratically elected president.
Mr Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw worked as Mr Walesa's presidential advisers in the early 1990s until they fell out and Mr Walesa fired them.
The three rarely miss an opportunity to criticise each other in public and yesterday was no exception.
Mr Kaczynski justified his snub by saying he didn't want to give Mr Walesa - who has called him a "moron" in the past - a chance for "boorish" behaviour.
But many leading public figures criticised the president's decision and declined to attend yesterday's gala in solidarity with Mr Walesa.
"Thanks to him, a sovereign Poland joined a free world and a united Europe," said Archbishop Tadeusz Goclowski of Gdansk.
Foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, representing the government at yesterday's ceremonies, said: "I don't know what to tell our foreign guests if they ask me, 'Why didn't you invite the best-known Pole in the world, who we believe helped overthrow communism?'"
Mr Walesa shrugged off the flap yesterday with a dig at the man he loves to hate.
"It's too bad I wasn't invited," he said, "because I really wanted to party and dance with [first lady] Mrs Kaczynski."
Meanwhile, Polish authorities are planning to exhume the body of Gen Wladyslaw Sikorski, the country's second World War prime minister, to confirm the cause of his death.
Gen Sikorski was killed on July 4th, 1943, off Gibraltar when his aircraft crashed into the sea.
The exhumation is intended to settle for good whether the aircraft's controls jammed, as a British investigation established, or whether the crash was deliberately engineered.
Later this month investigators will open Gen Sikorski's tomb, in Krakow's Wawel Cathedral, to carry out DNA and toxicology tests on the remains.