A signing ceremony is scheduled for Tuesday in Maisons-Laffitte.
Polish Radio CEO Paweł Majcher said the Kultura archives are an invaluable record of generations of Poles who lived and worked in exile after World War II, adding that preserving their legacy is "a duty of Polish Radio."
Andrzej Mietkowski, head of Polish Radio’s archives, said the collection is expected to include recordings of major historical significance.
Once catalogued and digitised, the materials will be used in Polish Radio programming and made available to the public online, he said.
The Kultura Institute was founded in Rome in 1946 by Jerzy Giedroyc, Józef Czapski, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Zofia Hertz to promote freedom of expression at a time when Poland was under Soviet domination.
The institute moved to France a year later.
Over the next five decades, Kultura played a central role in shaping political and cultural debate among Polish émigrés and readers in communist-ruled Poland.
It published 637 issues of the monthly Kultura, the Zeszyty Historyczne series, and about 550 books, including major works by writers such as Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz.
The institute’s audio archives are believed to contain thousands of hours of recordings.
The agreement is among the key events marking the Year of Józef Czapski and Jerzy Giedroyc. In 2026, Poland marks the 130th anniversary of Czapski’s birth and the 120th anniversary of Giedroyc’s birth.
Czapski, a co-founder of the institute, was a painter, writer and essayist who studied art in Warsaw and Kraków. He fought in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. After the outbreak of World War II, he was captured by the Soviets.
He was among a small group of Polish officers who survived Soviet imprisonment, while more than 20,000 Polish prisoners of war and intellectuals were murdered by Soviet authorities in the Katyn Massacre.
After joining the Polish army under Gen. Władysław Anders, Czapski was tasked with investigating the fate of missing Polish officers.
Czapski later documented his wartime experiences in the books Wspomnienia Starobielskie (Reminiscences of Starobelsk) and Na nieludzkiej ziemi (The Inhuman Land). He lived in Maisons-Laffitte until his death in 1993.
(mk/gs)