Elton John will collect Solidarity’s Medal of Gratefulness from Lech Wałęsa during a concert at the Ergo Arena Hall in Gdańsk on July 8, 2012.

The decision to award Elton John the medal was taken in 2010. During a concert in Gdańsk in 1984, five years before the collapse of communism, Elton addressed the audience, expressing hope for political change in Poland and Europe. Before the concert, he visited Lech Wałęsa in his apartment.

The Medal of Gratefulness was established by the European Solidarity Centre as a mark of gratitude to all foreign friends of Poland who through their good will, a sensitivity to injustice and devotion to a just cause actively supported the Solidarity movement. The medal has so far been given to some 400 people, including former French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, the Irish Nobel Prize winning dramatist and novelist Samuel Beckett and the British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash.

The Medal of Gratefulness features the Solidarity logo, the word ‘thank you’ in 43 languages and the Latin phrase ‘Hic nobis adiumento in periculis, solacio in laboribus fuit’, which means, “he rushed to help us amid danger, to console when times were difficult”.

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