Polish-Lithuanian union times best for two countries - Duda
Polish President Andrzej Duda has said, referring to his Lithuanian counterpart's Sunday visit to Poland, that the union between Poland and Lithuania was the best time for the two nations.
The President of Lithuania, Gitanas Nauseda, and his wife Diana Nausediene paid a visit to Poland on Sunday.
Together with Polish president and First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda, they spent a day in Poland's historical capital Krakow.
Two presidential couples took part in the ceremonies marking 500 years since the first toll of the famous 13-tonne bell Sigismund Bell in the Wawel Cathedral. The bell is said to have been made from scrapped Russian cannons captured by Polish-Lithuanian forces at the 1514 Battle of Orsha.
The two presidents also laid flowers at the tombs of two Kings of Poland and Grand Dukes of Lithuania, Wladyslaw Jagiello and Sigismund Augustus, and at the tombs of President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, who died along over 80 top state officials when their plane crashed near a military airfield in Smolensk, western Russia in 2010.
Nauseda's visit to Poland began at Cracow-based Polish Special Operations Component Command where the two presidents discussed security cooperation.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the biggest countries of 16th/17th-century Europe, with a large multi-ethnic population. It was formally established by the Union of Lublin in July 1569. Considerably reduced in size by the subsequent partitions of Poland by its neighbours Russia, Prussia and Austria in the second half of the 18th century, it disappeared from the map of Europe in 1795.
