Puzzle #41 — 2026-08-29
The answer was Poland. The scene was built from Lomza. Difficulty: hard.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- Long narrow strip fields with no hedges between them, and storks nesting on poles.
- A small roadside shrine holds a figure in a glass case.
- Rendered houses with steep roofs stand near panel blocks at the edge of town.
- The script is Latin but full of consonant clusters and slashed or tailed letters.
- The country is the largest of the ten that joined the European Union together in 2004.
What the scene was built from
The location is chosen first, from a hand-curated whitelist, and the image is generated to match the description below. That order is what makes the answer checkable: the scene is built for the place, not guessed from the picture.
| vegetation | long narrow strip fields with no hedges between them, birch and pine woodland, storks nesting on poles |
|---|---|
| terrain | gently rolling lowland with wide shallow valleys |
| architecture | rendered houses in pale colours with steep roofs, a small roadside shrine with a figure in a glass case, panel blocks at the edge of town |
| roadside | right-hand traffic, a narrow road with no shoulder, poplars along it |
| signage | Latin script full of consonant clusters and slashed or tailed letters (never rendered legibly) |
| light | flat continental light, big skies |
Where this actually is
Lomza, Poland sits at 53.18, 22.06 — see Lomza, Poland on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was one of the roughly third pulled for a second look at image quality and difficulty. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.