Greater Poland Voivodeship — where Poland began and eight hundred lakes.

Greater Poland covers 29,827 km², making it the second largest of Poland's sixteen regions after Masovia, and about 3.5 million people live here. The region took its present shape on 1 January 1999, assembled from historic Greater Poland plus the smaller lands of Pałuki, Krajna, a slice of Kuyavia and a northern strip of Lower Silesia. Poznań is the capital and the only city above half a million; after it come Kalisz, Konin, Piła, Ostrów Wielkopolski, Gniezno and Leszno. The land is almost defiantly flat — the highest hill, Kobyla Góra, reaches 284 metres — and everything drains towards the Warta, which carries water from 88 per cent of the region. Woodland covers just under 26 per cent, so the working landscape is fields.

This is where the Polish state begins, and it shows in specific buildings. In Gniezno, the Gothic archcathedral was begun in 1342 on the site of earlier churches; five rulers were crowned in it, from Bolesław the Brave in 1025 to Wenceslaus II of Bohemia in 1300. The south porch holds the Gniezno Doors, cast in bronze around 1175 with scenes from the life of Saint Adalbert, whose relics lie in the chancel in a reliquary of 1662. The cathedral has been a national historic monument since 1994. Poznań answers with its cathedral island, Ostrów Tumski, where the archcathedral is the oldest in Poland and the Golden Chapel holds the symbolic tombs of Mieszko I and Bolesław the Brave. The historic core of the city became a national monument in 2008, and at noon two mechanical goats butt heads on the Renaissance town hall above the market square.

The region's most intriguing site sits in water. Ostrów Lednicki, the largest of five islands in Lake Lednica, holds the foundations of a palace and its chapel, with two basins set into the chapel floor — almost certainly for baptism. That makes the island one of the candidate places for the baptism of Mieszko I in 966. The stronghold functioned until 1038, when an invasion led by the Bohemian duke Břetislav I destroyed it and burned the bridges. A boat takes visitors across today, and the site belongs to the Museum of the First Piasts, open since 1969. Lednica, Gniezno, Poznań and the early stronghold at Giecz are linked by the Piast Route, which also crosses into the neighbouring region towards Kruszwica, Strzelno and Biskupin.

The second layer is country houses, and in Greater Poland they almost always came with a library. Kórnik castle traces back to a carpenter's contract of 1426, but its present English neo-Gothic shape was given to it in the nineteenth century by Tytus Działyński, who drew among others on a design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The manuscripts and early printed books he gathered are now a library of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the tour passes through a Moorish hall modelled on the Alhambra; the castle has been a national monument since 2011. A short drive away, Rogalin combines a palace built between 1770 and 1776 for Kazimierz Raczyński, a purpose-built gallery of 1910 holding some 250 paintings, and a park with the famous Rogalin oaks — the three best known are called Lech, Czech and Rus.

For nature, the region runs on water and on what the ice sheet left behind. Greater Poland National Park, created in 1957 across 7,584 hectares south of Poznań, is a textbook glacial landscape of moraines, eskers, drumlins and ribbon lakes, with Lake Góreckie at its centre and a ruin on its wooded island. Part of Drawa National Park also falls inside the region. The lake districts hold roughly 800 lakes; the largest, Powidzkie, covers a little over ten square kilometres and is a sailing base. Within Poznań itself, the Morasko meteorite reserve, protected since 1976, contains six impact craters — the largest about 90 metres across and more than 11 metres deep — and in 2012 the heaviest meteorite ever found in Poland, 261 kilograms, was dug up here. In the south, Kalisz rests its claim to antiquity on Kalisia, a name on Ptolemy's second-century map, and on the amber trade route.