Warsaw: the old town that is seventy years old

A first-time visitor walking into Warsaw's Old Town sees painted houses and a medieval square, and almost never registers the fact of it: nearly all of it went up in the fifties, on ground that had been levelled rubble after 1944. That is why Warsaw's historic centre has to be read as a decision rather than an inheritance.

Sixty-three days, then a planned demolition

The Warsaw Uprising began on 1 August and capitulated on 2 October 1944 — sixty-three days. Around 15,200 insurgents were killed or went missing, and civilian deaths ran between 150,000 and 200,000, mostly in mass executions. After the surrender the entire remaining population was driven out, estimates running from 350,000 to 550,000 people, through the transit camp at Pruszkow; ninety thousand were sent to forced labour in Germany and sixty thousand to concentration camps.

Only then came the worst part for the city itself. By January 1945 about 85 per cent of Warsaw's buildings were gone, but the breakdown matters more than the percentage: a quarter fell in the fighting, and more than a third were demolished deliberately by German units, street by street, after the surrender. In total 10,455 buildings were destroyed, among them 923 historic ones and twenty-five churches. The demolition was not a consequence of war but a job somebody organised and carried out.

How a city is put back from paintings

The rebuilding ran from 1945 to 1953, with the main works between 1947 and 1951, and the Old Town was formally opened on 22 July 1953. It was done from whatever survived: Bernardo Bellotto's eighteenth-century cityscapes and drawings architecture students had made before the war, measuring facades for coursework. Bellotto's paintings, though, were not photographs — he embellished here and there, and those flourishes are now in plaster, on buildings that never had them.

UNESCO 1980 — for the reconstruction, not despite it

The historic centre of Warsaw was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1980, and the citation concerns not age but method: an outstanding example of the near-total reconstruction of a span of history covering the thirteenth to the twentieth century. What was listed, in other words, was the act of putting a city back. In a system where authenticity is the supreme criterion, Warsaw is the exception to the rule.

The Royal Castle is a separate story and the clearest proof of how political the decision was. German engineers blew it up between 10 and 13 September 1944, and the decision to rebuild came only on 20 January 1971 — twenty-seven years later. Work ran to 1984, paid for by donations: by May 1975 five hundred million zloty had been collected, and over a thousand works of art were given by citizens and foreign governments.

GuideThe rest of the city, district by district and with prices:Warsaw →

The Rising Museum and POLIN: same days, opposite tone

The Warsaw Rising Museum is the museum version of the first part of this story, and POLIN of what vanished before it. For planning, when you go matters more than the order: both museums keep the same calendar, so Warsaw is planned from the day of the week, not from the map.

POLIN, the museum of the history of Polish Jews, stands on the ground of the former ghetto, which the Germans razed after the ghetto uprising of 1943 — a year before the rest of the city. The building was designed by the Finns Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma, who won the competition in 2005; it opened on 19 April 2013, and the core exhibition, eight galleries and a thousand years of history, only on 28 October 2014.

Worst day for museums — Tuesday

The Palace of Culture: 237 metres nobody asked for

The Palace of Culture and Science was designed by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev, built between 2 May 1952 and 22 July 1955, and holds 3,288 rooms across forty-two floors. It stands 237 metres to the tip of the spire and 187.68 to the roof. Since 2007 the building has been a listed monument, which for a gift from Moscow is a fairly ironic ending.

GuideThe other Polish city put back from photographs:Gdańsk →

What makes Warsaw unusual is not that it was rebuilt but that it neither apologises for it nor brags about it. The Old Town is a reconstruction and does not hide it; Praga across the river is genuinely pre-war and nobody sells it as an attraction; the Palace still stands despite repeated proposals to pull it down. A city erased twice — the ghetto in 1943, everything else in 1944 — has learned that it need be neither sentimental nor quiet about its own history.