Day 19: The Old (and New) City of Warsaw

A restored section of the Old City walls.

Both the Old and New City of Warsaw are old – it’s just a relative term.  Warsaw had its beginnings in the 14th Century situated on some hills on the west bank of the Vistua River.  The capital of Poland back then was Krakow and it wasn’t until a series of minor events led to the change in locations (one of the Polish kings decided to move the capital due to Warsaw’s closer proximity to trade routes and the ongoing wars with Sweden, and besides his residence in Krakow burned down and had to be rebuilt somewhere).  The New City came about around the 15-16th Century since there wasn’t enough space for everyone to live within the walls of the Old City.

A typical street in the Old City.	The inner courtyard of the Polish Royal Castle, which has been destroyed and rebuilt three times in its 400-year history.

Something that I hadn’t realized from the history books is how much downtown Warsaw was devastated by World War II.  Warsaw experienced quite a bit of fighting in the war – besides the initial invasion in September 1939, there was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943 which the Nazis suppressed after a month of fighting, then there was the Polish national uprising in August 1944 when the Red Army reached the east bank of the Vistula (which the Germans also crushed over the course of two months while the Russians watched from the east), then Hitler ordered Warsaw to be razed to the ground (which, unlike his plans to raze Paris, these were actually carried out), and finally the Russians seized the city in January 1945.  Roughly 85% of the buildings were destroyed, including cultural monuments and historic buildings.  In many cases, reconstruction of historic Warsaw had to be done from paintings and works of art.

The Old Town of Warsaw in January 1945.	The modern day Old Town Market Square (also visible in the old photo to the left).
The memorial to the Polish nationals who died in the Katyn Forest massacre, killed by the Soviet NKVD in early 1940 after they annexed eastern Poland.  Roughly 22,000 people were killed and buried in mass graves.  The Soviets denied their role in the massacre until the collapse of the Soviet Union (and the Ukraine World War II museum still stuck to the original Soviet line that the Germans were responsible for the mass graves).	The monument to the Warsaw uprising.  They also have a museum dedicated to the uprising, but that’s located a bit further away and regardless we didn’t have time to fit it into our schedule.

When Greg was talking about Polish history, I asked him some about the Polish Partitions.  For context, there were three Polish Partitions in the latter half of the 18th Century in which Prussia, Russia, and Austria progressively annexed parts of Poland until at the end of it, Poland ceased to exist.   I always wondered how the surrounding countries were able to pull off the relatively bloodless annexation of a sovereign nation (though it’s been done before, such as the Baltic States into the Soviet Union in 1940) – basically, Greg said that it was a combination of legislative paralysis on the part of the Polish parliament (in the 17th Century, unanimous decisions were needed to pass acts) and an inability to defend itself (it had relied upon one major power to balance the others surrounding it – Russia against Prussia – which worked fine until the major powers decided to work together against Polish interests, kind of like what happened in September 1939 when the Soviets and Nazis divided Poland between them in a somewhat bloodier partition.  And I found out that there was some fighting in the First and Second partitions, just not enough to make a difference.

A lot of historical people came from Poland and there are various monuments, memorials, or plaques to signify this.  We saw the house Marie Curie was born in, the same with Joseph Conrad (the author of Heart of Darkness among other famous works), and the heart of Frederic Chopin (a famous Polish composer and pianist).  Even though Mel Brooks was born in America, his family came from the Danzig region (you know, the city the Germans ostensibly went to war over in 1939 – now named Gdansk) and in the quite hilarious movie To Be or Not to Be he plays the part of a Polish actor in Warsaw.

A statue of a mermaid in the Old Town Market Square.  The mermaid is the symbol of Warsaw and is depicted on the city’s coat of arms, coming from the legend that one of Triton’s daughters (Sawa, not Ariel) was swimming the Vistula and stopped to rest on a beach next to the then-village of Warsaw where fishermen admired her beauty and voice.	Marie Curie, a scientist famous for her discoveries in the field of radioactivity and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, was born in Warsaw and studied there before moving to Paris in 1891.  This is the building where she was born – in the New Town of Warsaw.