Trophy Polish Books at Gori State University

The paper is a joint research project of Gori and Warsaw State Universities. It tells us about the Polish books preserved in the library of Gori State Teaching University, which the Soviet Union brought as reparations from antiquity depositories of Eastern Europe, in particular Poland, after the Second World War. The topic of cultural heritage, including numerous trophy books, brought from defeated in World War II Germany to the Soviet Union, was a tabooed issue during the communist period. They wrote about the cultural heritage seized from the Soviet territories occupied by Hitler’s troops during the first years of the war, but even the general public and historians knew very little about reparations of books or museum exhibits from libraries and antiquity depositories of Germany in particular and Eastern Europe. The paper presents a general adventure of Polish cultural heritage against the background of captured from their homeland Polish books. The problem itself is much larger and, of course, requires much more extensive and in-depth research. Numerous archival documents, millions of files - correspondence, reports, protocols, lists of works of art, and other information are stored in the former Soviet republics. Finding them and studying them thoroughly is a matter of the future.