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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
A group of Belarusian exiles performed a 435-kilometre (270-mile) relay run around Warsaw along a route that created a map of Poland.
The organisers say that the endeavour was a “gesture of gratitude” to Poland for welcoming those fleeing Belarus as well as a celebration of Polish Independence Day on 11 November
The group of 20 runners, who call themselves Run Wawa Run (“Wawa” being Warsaw’s nickname), spent 44 hours completing the run, documenting their progress on Instagram.
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Each participant wore a watch with a GPS transmitter, which they passed on to the next person in the relay. That then allowed them, using a tracking application, to trace a map of Poland.
“It was an awesome logistical and organisational operation,” wrote the organisers. “We ran day and night on roads, paths, through fields and forests, villages and cities to draw such a gorgeous map! No one has done this before.”
They added that “this is also a gesture of gratitude and congratulations to Poland on Independence Day”, which is celebrated on 11 November, the anniversary of when the country returned to the map of Europe in 1918, after spending over a century under foreign partitions.
Many of the participants in the run are political exiles who fled Belarus’s authoritarian regime and found refuge in Poland, which has taken in a large number of Belarusian refugees and immigrants.
“Many of the runners in our club can’t return to Belarus, even though they’d like to,” one of the members of Run Wawa Run, Zmicier Jahorau, told broadcaster Belsat. “They fled the country to escape repression for participating in protests or showing solidarity and sympathy for the victims of the regime.”
It is estimated that there are around 150,000 Belarusians living in Poland, making them the country’s second-largest immigrant group behind Ukrainians. Poland’s government has regularly criticised the Belarusian regime of Alexander Lukashenko for its human rights abuses.
Belarus has protested to Poland over plans for a march in Warsaw this Saturday organised by opponents of the Belarusian government.
Minsk says it is a “destructive event” that will "harm Belarusian-Polish relations" and warns it may "take countermeasures" https://t.co/1wVlpQnX1U
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) August 6, 2025
Jahorau said that the biggest difficulty was planning the path of their run to fit around crossings over the Vistula, Narew and Bug rivers while still drawing a map of Poland. They have made their route available for download to others who want to try it.
Local wildlife was also a challenge. “We encountered various animals along the route: moose, deer, but the worst were the dogs running loose trying to chase the runners,” said Jahorau. “No one saw any wolves, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t see us!”
This is not the first time that Run Wawa Run has undertaken a run intended to create a symbolic image. Two years ago they ran a route within Warsaw that created a picture of Pahonia, an armoured knight on horseback that has been adopted as a symbol of the democratic Belarusian opposition.
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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: run_wawa_run_by/Instagram
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
