Chiral Symmetry and Parity--Violating Meson--Nucleon Vertices

In this lecture, I review progress made in the calculations of the parity-violating meson-nucleon interaction regions. The underlying framework is the topological chiral soliton model of the nucleon. Emphasis is put on the computation of theoretically and experimentally accessible nuclear parity violating observables. I stress the importance of the interplay of strong and weak interactions which makes this field interesting and challenging. I also discuss recent developments pointing towards the importance of strange quark admixtures in the proton wave function. (Invited talk presented at the Workshop on ``Baryons as Skyrme Solitons'', Siegen, September, 1992. For figures, contact author)