Once the centrepiece of a mighty empire, Warsaw suffered occupation by Russia and terrible repression under Nazi Germany before being rebuilt as a vibrant modern capital. Alexandra Richie explores the rich history of the ‘phoenix city’
The story of Warsaw is, in the first instance, a story of movement – of people, goods and ideas.
Slavic tribes and others migrated west to this area at the time of the dissolution of the Roman empire, around the turn of the fifth century AD. Slowly, small fishing settlements grew up along the Vistula River, the earliest known being Bródno, Kamion, Jazdów and Warszowa, all now areas of Warsaw.
At first, Warsaw was rather a backwater. When the state of Poland was established in the 10th century, under one Duke Mieszko of the Piast dynasty, its capital was far to the west in Gniezno – now a smallish town near Poznań.
But from the 12th century, under the dukes of Mazovia, the settlements that now comprise Warsaw began to become wealthy. The soil produced good quantities of grain, and the Vistula River provided an artery for trade – particularly into the Baltic Sea at Gdańsk. Warsaw was an outpost where grain, timber and salt from the mines around Kraków were accumulated for transport along the river.
Every time a shipment went past, somebody made a bit of money out of it – specifically, the dukes of Mazovia. And from the 13th century, they started to use that wealth to build the first elements of Warsaw that are recognisable today: stone buildings in the Old Town, the foundations of what became Warsaw Castle, and a number of churches, including St John’s Archcathedral (which, like most other monuments in Warsaw, was completely rebuilt after destruction in the Second World War)
In 1413, Warsaw became the official seat of the Mazovian dynasty. The district now known as the New Town evolved north of the original old centre, housing many incomers, including a sizeable Jewish population.
Warsaw in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
A dynasty is only as strong as its line of succession – and in 1526, the last duke of Mazovia died without an heir. Mazovia was now ruled directly by the kings of Poland, which by this time had become a large and powerful entity with its capital in Kraków.
It became more important still in the later Middle Ages and into the Renaissance period, following the 1569 union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was forged initially to counter the growing threat from Russia to the east. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as it came to be known, burgeoned into one of the great empires of Europe.
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After the deal was sealed, the capital was moved from Warsaw, with the Sejm (lower house of parliament) first held here in 1569. Warsaw was chosen not because it was at that time a great city, but because of a simple fluke of geography: it’s more or less halfway between Kraków and Lithuania.
King Sigismund III Vasa decided to move his court to Warsaw in 1596, revamping the castle into a royal residence. It’s interesting to note that Sigismund was in fact Swedish, because Polish kings were elected by the noble families which helped to curb the autocratic power of the king. Partly as a result, Poland was known for its tolerance; Jews settled here, along with Tatars, Germans and other communities.
Through the 17th century, Poland thrived on trade, and Warsaw became an influential cultural centre – a prosperous, powerful place in the heart of Europe. Successive kings showed off that power in their capital – for example, the famous Sigismund’s Column was erected in Castle Square by that great king’s son, Władysław IV Vasa, in homage to his father.
Beautiful buildings were constructed, including the palace on the isle in Łazienki Park – commissioned as a bathing pavilion for a noble prince, and later transformed into a beautiful neoclassical edifice for King Stanisław August in 1764. The Old Town and so-called New Town also reflect the prosperity and influence of Warsaw at this time.
Warsaw’s years of decline
While the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth thrived, autocratic regimes surrounding it were also growing powerful. In a sense, Poland became a prisoner of her geography. To the east was Muscovy under Peter the Great and then Catherine the Great; the Hohenzollern dynasty burgeoned in Prussia to the west, and the Habsburgs to the south.
At the same time, the importance of grain transported through the Baltic Sea waned, and with it the power of the Hanseatic League and cities such as Gdańsk.
Instead, long-distance maritime trade boomed. The Spanish and Portuguese empires had already become firmly established in the 16th century, and Amsterdam was starting to thrive, along with England. This caused the balance of power in Europe to shift rapidly and dramatically.
Then, in the mid-17th century, Poland was hit by the so-called Swedish deluge – a series of incursions by Sweden, amid rising aggression from Russians, Tatars, Ottomans and others.
Warsaw was sacked and the population was decimated. Poland as a whole entered a period of decline, as the three great powers around it became more and more powerful.
In 1772, Poland was divided up between Prussia, Austria and Russia, with huge swathes of territory just sliced off and given to those powers. The Poles tried to reform and resist this partition, inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution. They wrote a constitution – the second great constitution to be written, after that of the US.
But Catherine the Great decided to clamp down and secure her rule in Poland. This instigated two further partitions of Poland – which, in 1795, effectively disappeared from the map for 123 years. Warsaw became a small provincial town within first Prussia, and then the Russian empire.
Warsaw under Russia
There were moments when the Poles thought that they might regain their autonomy and power. Napoleon swept through Poland in 1806, and created the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807. But his attempt to invade Russia failed and, after the Congress of Vienna, Poland became a sort of rump state controlled from Russia.
Yet the people of Warsaw never lost their pride. They remembered their imperial days, when they were powerful and wealthy. Warsawians worked on the city’s infrastructure, developing train systems and building industry. Even though it was ruled from St Petersburg, Warsaw became quite a successful town – the most prosperous city in the Russian empire, in fact.
Museums and libraries were built and archives established. Sewer, train and tram systems were installed, and electricity introduced – all the things that were happening in Vienna, Berlin and London. You can still see the beautiful university buildings on Krakowskie Przedmieście boulevard, and the grand neoclassical palaces and public buildings along the Royal Route, which stretches south from the Old Town to Łazienki Park. The Grand Theatre, one of the largest in Europe, was opened in 1833. The 19th century also saw the construction of luxurious hotels, culminating in the Hotel Bristol – when it opened in 1901, it was the most modern in Europe.
But the city’s dynamism was kept in check under Russian political control – something the Poles resented. In 1830, a rebellion broke out but was brutally crushed, sparking a wave of emigration, particularly to Paris.
During this period, many pro-independence cultural figures left, including poet Adam Mickiewicz and composer Frédéric Chopin, who died in exile in Paris – though his heart was returned to Warsaw, where it’s interred in a pillar at the Holy Cross Church.
Warsaw and Polish independence
Warsaw was taken by German forces in 1915, during the First World War. But it wasn’t devastated; in fact the Germans were considered to be quite acceptable occupiers.
When Russia pulled out of the war in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution – through the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk – Warsaw was effectively ceded to the Germany, but that was a situation that would not last.
A key figure at that moment was Marshal Józef Piłsudski. When the central powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman empire were defeated, Piłsudski grasped the moment to ensure Poland emerged as an independent nation once more – with him as its first prime minister. The generation that came of age at this time, from 1918 until 1939, would do anything for Poland and for Warsaw – a spirit that became evident during the following conflict.
The three parts of the formerly partitioned and occupied zones had to be knitted back together. New rail lines had to be built, and infrastructure re-established. National institutions were reformed, national banks were established, and so on – with Warsaw at the centre of it all.
Stefan Starzyński, the city’s mayor for five years from 1934, shaped Warsaw into the thriving capital it long should have been. He oversaw extensive building projects, creating whole districts such as Żoliborz, a beautiful little borough designed to house the military, civil servants, and journalists and writers.
Still, the interwar period was not an easy time economically or politically. Radical groups emerged, and there were problems with the treatment of minorities. Then, from 1933, Adolf Hitler‘s Nazi Germany rose to the west.
Warsaw during the Second World War
On 1 September 1939, bombs started falling – the first terror bombing of a capital city – starting raids that destroyed about 20 per cent of Warsaw. The city was quickly besieged by German forces, who took the city at the end of the month.
The Nazis quickly made efforts to purge potential resistance. The Einsatzgruppen SS death squads targeted the intelligentsia first – priests, university professors, newspaper editors, cultural figures, politicians – who were captured and murdered. Some were taken to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, outside the southern Polish town of Oświęcim.
The Warsaw Ghetto
The second prong of this attack was launched against Poland’s Jewish community, marked by the creation of the walled Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940.
Vile German propaganda tried to create a view of Jews as impoverished vermin whereas, in fact, Warsaw’s Jewish population was tremendously mixed. There were poor migrant Jews, true – but there was also a huge, thriving Jewish community with newspapers, theatre, politicians of all stripes. Before the war, more than 30 per cent of Warsaw’s population was Jewish – indeed, it was the world’s second-largest Jewish city after New York.
The Nazis set out to destroy all this. Forcing Warsaw’s Jewish population into the cramped ghetto was the first major step. Then the mass deportations began.
Of the 400,000-plus people in the Warsaw Ghetto, about 100,000 died of disease and starvation. And from July 1942, the Nazi Grossaktion (‘Great Action’) saw thousands forced onto trains to the extermination camp at Treblinka daily. More than 800,000 people were murdered there in just a few months.
The Jews who remained in the ghetto, mostly young people who’d been kept back by the Germans to work, organised resistance. In April 1943, they launched the first large uprising in the history of the Nazi occupation of Europe.
The Warsaw rising was brutally crushed. These brave souls knew that they were going to die – but as Marek Edelman, one of the last survivors of the Jewish fighting organisation, said, they wanted “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths”. Jürgen Stroop, who was in command of the response to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, had the beautiful synagogue blown up, claiming a great triumph for Nazism over the Jews.
The Warsaw Rising
By 1944, the Poles saw that Soviet forces were sweeping in, and made the mistake of thinking that the Germans were finished. But Walter Model, one of Hitler’s most able generals, launched a counteroffensive just east of Warsaw, slamming into the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw in late July.
In the meantime, the Poles realised that the Red Army was not going to be their friend – rather, one tyrannical dictator would just be exchanged for another. So they decided to welcome the Red Army into their city, to persuade the Soviets to treat them as allies, not Nazi stooges.
Hearing the sounds of fighting to the east, the Poles believed that the Soviets were about to enter Warsaw, and on 1 August began another uprising against the German occupiers. Initially, it was quite successful, and swathes of Warsaw were captured. But the Germans retained control of the bridges, airports and main arteries through the city, and were able to turn the tide. The result was a series of massacres in places such as Wola, where at least 30,000 men, women and children were slaughtered.
The Germans then turned their sights on the walled Old Town, pounding it with artillery and aerial bombing. After 63 days, the Warsaw Rising was finally crushed, and the survivors taken to the Pruszków transit camp. The whole city was emptied, with many of its inhabitants sent to Auschwitz or Ravensbrück, or to be used as slave labour in Germany. The rest were pushed out into the countryside, where they were forced to eke out an existence as best they could.
Having ordered the murder or removal of Warsaw’s population, Hitler decreed that the city should be razed to the ground. First it was looted, then it was blown up – building by building and street by street.
Save for a few buildings that the Germans were still using, such the Hotel Bristol, almost everything was destroyed. When the Soviets entered Warsaw on 17 January 1945, they found only a smouldering ruin.
Warsaw’s postwar reconstruction
The Soviet view was that Warsaw should be flattened and replaced by a kind of socialist paradise. But the Warsawians themselves wanted to maintain at least something of their old city, and started to rebuild the Old Town and New Town. Art historians and architects used historical paintings to recreate buildings in their original patterns and colours, so the façades are exactly as they would have been in the 17th or 18th century. The centre of Warsaw is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, even though it’s been completely reconstructed.
The newly established Polish People’s Republic was, of course, very much under Soviet control. And for four decades, Warsaw was shaped in the Soviet style, with the construction of edifices such as the monumental Palace of Culture and Science (1955), one of Europe’s tallest buildings.
But even at the height of Stalinist repression, Poles established underground organisations to help each other. Workers’ organisations became active, particularly after the crushing of the first demonstrations in Gdańsk, as well as civic society organisations such as the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR), formed in Warsaw in 1976.
The communist government didn’t know how to respond. In 1981, it clamped down on Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement, imprisoning dozens of people in Warsaw who were perceived to be a threat. But the changes sweeping world politics influenced ideas in Poland – and then, of course, Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union quickly led to the erosion of the Iron Curtain.
Warsaw and the end of communism
A key moment in Poland happened in 1989, when roundtable talks began in what’s now the presidential palace in Warsaw. It was accepted that Poles would be allowed to field candidates for certain seats in the parliament – almost all of which were won by the Polish trade union Solidarity, and the communist government crumbled.
Today, Warsaw is a very green, pleasant place to walk around. Despite tragic elements of its history, the energy is open-minded and forward-looking. And though first impressions are of a higgledy-piggledy city, with some skyscrapers and some old communist buildings and some rebuilt medieval and Renaissance structures, Warsaw has an energy that’s hard to beat.
Alexandra Richie was talking to Paul Bloomfield, travel journalist and host of our podcast series History’s Greatest Cities
What to see: Warsaw in five places
The ‘phoenix city’ has enjoyed imperial might and endured occupation and destruction. Alexandra Richie highlights five spots that reveal intriguing XXXX.
1. Royal Castle
In the heart of the Old Town, overlooking the Castle Square and its soaring Sigismund III Vasa Column, stands the Royal Castle. The first wooden tower on this site was built in the 14th century by the Dukes of Masovia, then developed into a royal residence after Warsaw was incorporated into the kingdom of Poland.
At the end of the 16th century, that great king Sigismund decided to move his court from Kraków to Warsaw, and commissioned a revamp of the castle to make it a suitable royal palace. Over the following couple of centuries, during the heyday of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it became one of the most splendid royal residences in Europe.
Much of its fabulous art collection was destroyed or plundered during Swedish and Russian invasions of the 17th century and, as with most of central Warsaw, the castle was blown up by the Nazis towards the end of the Second World War. But it was lovingly rebuilt during the 1970s and 80s, and today you can admire the royal apartments and assembly hall.
It’s a potent symbol of rebirth in this ‘phoenix city’, so many times devastated and reconstructed, and the Castle Square is a wonderful, optimistic place to linger on a summer’s day.
2. Palace of Culture and Science
In start contrast to that opulent royal grandeur is the Palace of Culture and Science, looming some 237 metres over the central financial district. This monolithic skyscraper, modelled on the Seven Sisters complex in Moscow and completed in 1955, was built on Stalin’s orders as a quote-unquote ‘gift to the people of Warsaw’. In truth, of course, it was designed to stamp Soviet might and power on the city.
After the collapse of communism in 1989, a great debate raged over whether it should be torn down, but many people remembered fondly events they’d attended in its theatres, sports halls, swimming pool and so on. And amazing things did happen in this building.
As an experiment, in 1967 the Rolling Stones were allowed to perform here, though tickets were of course allocated almost entirely to the communist party elite and their families. The concert sparked mayhem inside and what was effectively a riot outside. Rock concerts were then effectively banned until ABBA appeared nearly a decade later, part of a deal with Sweden involving the construction of a new hotel in the middle of Warsaw.
3. Łazienki Park
Warsawians love Łazienki Park, a swath of manicured greenery south of the centre that also evaded the worst of the Nazis’ campaign of destruction. The centrepiece is the Palace on the Isle, originally built as a Baroque bathing pavilion (Łazienki means ‘bathhouse’) but purchased by King Stanisław II August in 1764 and transformed into a luxurious neoclassical residence.
Today you can still admire the extensive art collection, and the marble bas reliefs in the bathhouse depicting figures from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The surrounding park is gorgeous, and encompasses a wonderful botanical garden. Each summer Sunday, free Chopin concerts are performed under the famous statue of Chopin.
4. Praga
Across the Vistula River from the Old Town, on the east bank, is the former working-class district of Praga. Unlike the historic core, it wasn’t targeted by Hitler, so remains one of the few areas not reconstructed wholesale.
The reason is that it was a very poor suburban district in the 19th and early 20th century, home to factories, warehouses and so on, and it remained rather down-at-heel for decades after the war. But as with many similar areas in European cities, particularly in the former Eastern Bloc, these industrial buildings are now being repurposed and the area is becoming increasingly hip.
At its heart is the Polish Vodka Museum, housed in a late-19th-century neo-Gothic distillery complex surrounded by bars, clubs and restaurants, art galleries and pop-ups. Praga epitomises Warsaw’s attitude: it’s a vibrant, youthful, forward-looking, innovative city.
5. Warsaw Ghetto
When I first came to Warsaw in the 1980s, there was no official mention of Jewish life in the city. Under the Soviets, there had been no Holocaust; everybody was simply a victim of fascism, and what happened to the Jews was no worse than what happened to anybody else.
So there was almost nothing to show for what was once the thriving centre of Jewish life, nor the horrific oppression and violence meted out to Warsaw’s Jews in the cramped, walled ghetto into which they were forced in 1940, and in the Treblinka death camp north-east of the city. Virtually the only remnant of Warsaw’s over-350,000-strong prewar Jewish community was the Jewish cemetery, overgrown and largely in ruins.
Since then, though, awareness of this important story has flourished. Centerpiece of these efforts is the magnificent POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, featuring powerful exhibitions and and hosting seminars and other events. The drive among young Warsovians to explore what was lost, and to try to revive and celebrate this community as well as commemorating the Holocaust, is extraordinary.
Alexandra Richie is professor at Collegium Civitas, Warsaw, and the author of books including Warsaw 1944: The Fateful Uprising (HarperCollins, 2013). She was talking to Paul Bloomfield, a travel journalist and the host of our podcast series History’s Greatest Cities. Listen to the companion podcast on Warsaw or explore the entire series