Europe’s summer has taken a punishing turn, and this week it’s Poland’s turn to sweat through history.
On Tuesday, the country recorded its highest ever temperature since records began, with the mercury hitting 38.2°C in Słubice, a small town on the German border that has now, rather unwillingly, earned its place in the meteorological record books. That’s not just uncomfortable. For a country more accustomed to cool continental summers, it’s genuinely alarming.
The heatwave that baked Spain, France, and the Czech Republic over the past fortnight has been steadily pushing eastward, and forecasters at Poland’s Institute of Meteorology and Water Management warned earlier this week that the hot air mass shows no sign of retreating before the weekend. Parts of Warsaw hit 36°C on Wednesday, with overnight temperatures staying stubbornly above 20°C in the capital, making sleep a luxury rather than a given.
Schools in several southern provinces have shortened their hours, and health authorities have opened cooling centres in major cities. Polish Red Cross volunteers have been distributing water at railway stations in Kraków and Wrocław, where platforms baking in direct sun have become something of a hazard.
“We’ve had hot summers before, but nothing like this, not in July, not here,” said one Warsaw resident interviewed by public broadcaster TVP. “You step outside and it just hits you.”
Scientists are careful to avoid attributing any single event entirely to climate change, but the broader pattern is difficult to ignore. According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, June 2025 was the second hottest June ever recorded across the continent, continuing a streak of record-breaking months that has become almost routine.
The heat is now expected to push further into the Baltic states and Ukraine over the coming days, with Lithuania and Latvia potentially seeing temperatures 10 to 12 degrees above their seasonal averages.
For Poland, the immediate concern is practical: water reserves in several eastern rivers are already low after a dry spring, and agricultural losses are mounting. Farmers in the Lublin region have been particularly vocal about the damage to cereal crops.
Whether this summer marks a genuine turning point in how Central Europe thinks about heat preparedness, or whether it gets quietly filed away as an anomaly, remains to be seen.
