The building of the editorial office of the famous Kultura monthly magazine and the headquarters of the Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute), are located in the Paris suburb of Maisons Laffitte. In this inconspicuous place you will find one of the most important monuments of contemporary Polish culture. Polish culture arrived here in 1952, when Jerzy Giedroyc, Józef Czapski and Zofia and Zygmunt Hertz, wartime émigrés who, while still in the Anders Army, founded the Literary Institute to promote Polish writing and the monthly magazine Kultura to be its organ, moved into a house at no. 91 avenue de Poissy. From then on, for the next half century, number 91 on avenue de Poissy was the centre of Polish intellectual and political life. "Kultura" became the leading Polish periodical of the 20th century, giving Poles a platform for freedom of expression beyond the reach of communist censorship. Outstanding writers such as Czesław Miłosz, Witold Gombrowicz and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński published here. Jerzy Giedroyc's magazine also brought Poland closer to its eastern neighbours, publishing important authors and works from Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus and Russia. Decades before the fall of communism, in the pages of Kultura, visionaries such as Juliusz Mieroszewski outlined the political programme which led Poland to Europe after 1989. The Literary Institute published hundreds of books and nearly a thousand issues of magazines. Kultura itself ceased to operate after Jerzy Giedroyc's death on 14 September 2000. Today, at number 91 on avenue de Poissy, there is a museum celebrating the legacy of Kultura and its editors, which anyone can visit by appointment. It is also home to a research institute which makes its vast book and archive resources available to interested researchers from Poland and the rest of Europe.

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