Polish Sabre
The sabre of the Commonwealth. Cut fast from the wrist, lunge long, stay covered. Tuesdays in Penzance, from September 2026.
What It Is
A curved blade, a nation that fenced with it for six centuries, and a book that came late.
Poland took to the sabre early. Curved blades came west with the Hungarians and the Turks, and from the fourteenth century onwards the szabla became the sword of the Polish Commonwealth: at the hip of every nobleman, in the hands of the winged hussars, and fenced with in a way that was the Commonwealth's own.
The manuscripts came late. Polish sabre was fenced for centuries before anyone wrote it down in a form that survives, and the earliest manuscripts documenting it are eighteenth century. From their illustrations, Akademia Szermierzy in Warsaw, and Antek Olbrychski above all, reconstructed the art as we now train it. Not a modern invention with a Polish name: the old cut and the old lunge, read back off the page.
One thing to clear up, because everyone has heard it. The famous Polish cross‑cutting, the figure‑of‑eight slashing back and forth, is a myth. Every fencing tradition has a diagram of the lines a cut can travel, like Fiore's segno with its seven blows. Later German writers saw the Polish one and read it as a sequence of swings. It was a map, not a routine. Nobody who has fenced this art cuts like that.
The big cut from the shoulder is not in the sources either. What is there is faster, smaller, and far more dangerous.
The Cut
From the wrist, with the fastest part of the blade, and finished covered.
A sabre blade weighs very little. There is no axe head on the end of it and no leverage to speak of, so a sabre cut cannot be a chop. What it can be is fast. The cut is made from the wrist, the tip accelerating through the target, and it lands with the last inches of the blade. A sharp sabre moving like that slices. It does not need force, and force only slows it down.
The old military manuals say exactly this. Waite, teaching sabre to the British Army in 1880: "Rough and heavy hitting should be avoided: it destroys quickness; greater effect is given to a hit by pace than by force." And: "A hard hitter has to brace himself together before attacking; he thus prepares, and while doing so may easily be hit." That bracing is the wind‑up, and the wind‑up is where a good sabreur hits your hand.
So we cut shallow, we cut fast, and we finish every cut in a position that covers us. Antek's running correction in Warsaw was "too deep". An inch across the forearm is enough; the blade does the work. And a cut that finishes covered means the answer coming back finds steel in its way.
The Lunge
The foot goes first. The hit lands before the foot does. The whole body follows in one line.
The Polish sabre lunge is the thing people notice first, and it is not the Olympic one. The foot goes first. You hit before the foot lands. The arm is already extended along your line, so the lunge covers you as it arrives; the back foot slides after; and the whole thing is closer to a jump than a step. Mikołaj Kołodziej teaches it with the chest proud and the free arm thrown back, which looks like a flourish and is nothing of the kind. The hips stay forward, the chest gives you the reach and the stability, and the arm behind you is the counterweight that lets you land it.
An arm and a leg on opposite sides of the body put your whole torso into the diagonal, and a body is strongest along its diagonal. That is where the reach comes from. And when the lunge is not enough there is the fleche: you run for your life, forwards, collecting his blade on the way in.
If that looks a little like sport fencing, it is because sport fencing is what the European sabre lines became. The lunge and the fleche came from sabre. Fiore's longsword never had them. We are not borrowing from the Olympics; the Olympics borrowed from this.
Covered While You Attack
The guard that protects a whole side of you by sitting still, and the cut that finishes in one.
The heart of Polish sabre is that you are covered while you attack. Stand a little side‑on with the sabre in the right‑side guard, the classical third, and your whole right side is protected without you moving anything: the guard does the work by being there. Attacks to your left cost you one movement. Attacks to your right cost you none. Everything else in the art is built to keep that free cover while the cut goes out and comes home.
The clearest example is the cut the Poles called the Hellish Quart. It is a lunge that finishes with the hand high on the left, the hilt covering the head, so that the attack and the parry are one act. You hit, and you are already covered against the answer. Some of the deepest head cuts in the system are made this way, turning the false edge over at the end to reach.
When Jake brought this home from Warsaw, Andy saw it at once and put it in Fiore's words: "There's something similar in Fiore already. We talk about how your sword is your shield. So when you attack, you are moving from posta to posta, and that covers the lines of attack that your opponent can use." That is the bridge between our longsword and our sabre, and it is why the two sit so well together on a Tuesday.
Głos mistrza · The Master's Voice
Every movement should be slow and small, and then end explosively long and large.— Antek Olbrychski, Akademia Szermierzy · Warsaw, 2026
How We Train It
Footwork first, then the guards, then the cut, on the club's own steel.
Polish sabre is a Tuesday thing now. Andy teaches it, from a lesson plan he and Jake built together in September 2026, and Jake demonstrates, having spent a month learning it in Warsaw. We start where the Poles start: footwork, then the guards, then the cut. Only when the cut is right do we spar.
You need nothing to begin. The club owns nine Krieger S6 sabres, the same steel Akademia Szermierzy fences with, and a full loaner kit of masks, gloves, jackets, gorgets and plated protectors for everyone in the room. See the armoury.
We fence for clean hits. A parry and riposte is worth more than trading blows, and a double is not a point for anyone. It is the least macho way to fence and by far the most beautiful, and it is what the sources reward.
Where It Comes From
A month in Warsaw with the best sabre room on earth.
In August 2026 our sponsor, Jake Arthur Traynor, lived in Warsaw for a month and trained every day at Akademia Szermierzy under Antek Olbrychski, the world number one in sabre, Mikołaj Kołodziej, in the world's top eleven in both sabre and longsword, and the school's founder, Rafał Kalus. Antek is one of the people who reconstructed Polish sabre from the sources, and a historian of it. Jake came home with the whole system, and Antek wrote afterwards that he had made "mega progres".
What we train is that art, as those three men teach it, brought to Cornwall with their encouragement and an open invitation to go back. Read about the month.
Hold a sabre
Tuesdays, 7pm, Penzance Leisure Centre. Your first lesson is free, and the club lends everything, sabre included.