When a football fan from the 21st century thinks about the city of Warsaw, the famous Legia comes to mind, with their very well known ultras, their many domestic trophies won and their constant presence in european competitions. Not many would associate the polish capital to one of the other football clubs: Gwardia, polish cup winners in 1954, dissolved in 2018, Hutnik have never been in the Ekstraklasa and are unknown to most, and then there's Polonia. The black shirts , as the club's players are nicknamed, were once the most important club in Warsaw and their history of resistance and oppression deserves to be told. Let's take a step back to the beginning: back in 1911 Poland didn't exist as a country, the land was split between the big empires of that time, and the city of Warsaw was part of the Russian partition. This makes the choice of the name Polonia much more meaningful in the context of the russification of Poland imposed by the empire. The patriotic symboli...
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