๐ How Rare Are You in Poland?
๐ต๐ฑ Genetic Landscape of Poland
Poland sits on the genetic frontier between Western and Eastern Europe, with Slavic genetic foundations overlaid by Germanic, Baltic, and Viking influences. The Polish population is notably homogeneous by European standards, but what stands out is the high frequency of light eyes (~69% blue, gray, or green) and the relatively high rate of B blood type (16%) compared to Western Europe. Poland also shows interesting genetic traces from Sarmatian and Scythian steppe peoples.
Ask an older family here where it comes from and the answer often involves two countries. After 1945 the state was shifted bodily westward, and households from what is now western Ukraine and Belarus were resettled into formerly German cities such as Wroclaw and Szczecin, so a family in the west may keep eastern dialect words and recipes from a village it can no longer visit. Surnames preserve the older geography. The endings -ski and -cki began as marks of place, a family of Zakrzewo becoming Zakrzewski, while -wicz endings often point east toward the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Feminine forms still shift with the ending, which is why Kowalski and Kowalska are one surname rather than two.
๐ข Eleven digits, and everything they hold
Polish citizens get an eleven-digit PESEL number, and so do EU citizens and their family members living in Poland, and foreigners holding certain residence statuses. Most of it is not arbitrary. The official explanation on gov.pl sets out the form RRMMDDPPPPK: two digits for the year of birth, two for the month, two for the day, a four-digit serial, and a check digit. The month also carries the century, so January 1900 is written 01, January 2000 is 21, and January 2100 would be 41. Sex sits inside the serial, whose last digit is even for a woman and odd for a man. The eleventh digit is arithmetic — gov.pl sets out the weights and the sum that produce it from the other ten.
That is the whole of it: a date, a sex, a serial, a checksum. The number records no eye colour, no hair colour and no blood group. So the tables below cannot have come out of the register.
๐๏ธ Eye Color
| Blue | 45% |
| Gray | 12% |
| Green | 12% |
| Hazel | 15% |
| Brown | 16% |
๐ Hair Color
| Brown | 30% |
| Dark Brown | 25% |
| Blonde | 22% |
| Black | 10% |
| Red | 3% |
| Gray | 10% |
๐ฉธ Blood Type
| A+ | 32% |
| O+ | 31% |
| B+ | 12% |
| AB+ | 6% |
| A- | 6% |
| O- | 7% |
| B- | 4% |
| AB- | 2% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets โ see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Poland
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Poland's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
๐ The surname list that stops at one
Ask how rare your surname is in Poland and the state will more or less answer. Ministerstwo Cyfryzacji publishes the surnames in the PESEL register as open data on dane.gov.pl, under a CC0 1.0 licence, updated yearly, every name with its count against it. A second release covers the register’s surnames including those of people who have died. Given names get the same treatment in their own annual file, with occurrence counts beside each.
There is a floor, and the dataset notes say so plainly: surnames occurring only once are left out, and so, from the main file, are the names of the dead. Rarity has an official cut-off. Be the sole holder of a surname and the register stops publishing it. The children’s names dataset draws the line elsewhere — up to 2012 a name needed five occurrences to be listed, and from 2013 the threshold is two. More on that problem in how rare is my name.
๐ Thirteen minorities, named in the act itself
Poland’s Act of 6 January 2005 on national and ethnic minorities and the regional language settles which groups count as minorities in the text of the law itself. Article 2 names nine national minorities — Belarusian, Czech, Lithuanian, German, Armenian, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian and Jewish — and four ethnic ones: Karaim, Lemko, Roma and Tatar. Kashubian is designated separately, in Article 19, as the regional language.
The act then attaches a number to the names. Where residents belonging to a minority are not fewer than 20% of a commune, that minority’s language may be used as an auxiliary language before the commune authorities, and additional traditional place names in it may stand beside the Polish ones. The minister responsible for religious denominations and national and ethnic minorities keeps the registers of the communes that qualify under each provision. Silesian appears nowhere in the act: not among the thirteen, and not as the regional language.
โญ Rare Facts About Poland
What is sourced here and what is not
Two things here have institutions behind them. The population figure comes from Główny Urząd Statystyczny, which calls itself Statistics Poland in English and publishes Poland’s population figures; the tile is rounded. The name data comes from Ministerstwo Cyfryzacji, the ministry listed as publisher of the PESEL name datasets on dane.gov.pl. The eye colour, hair colour, height and blood type tables do not. We found no Polish state publication giving them; the gov.pl pages of Narodowe Centrum Krwi cover the public blood service and carry material on blood groups, but no national ABO/Rh breakdown we could locate. Read those as sample estimates, not counts. Last checked September 2026.