JK'ing Around in Europe: Eastern Europe: Warsaw

Moving along on our trip, we arrived in Warsaw around 6:00 in the morning after a truly unpleasant overnight bus trip from Lithuania.

You thought I was kidding?

We managed with a 'bath' of sorts in the bus station, and headed out to the large central park to wander around while waiting for the city to wake up! It was pretty gorgeous there - very similar to NYC's Central Park, in that there were many different areas catering to different activities, and it was all very well maintained. It's 76 hectares, if you're the type of person who can picture sizes like that in your head (I'm not one of those people).

Peacock!

This is Lazienki Palace, the Palace on the Water. It dates back to the 1680s and was originally a bathhouse, later converted into the King's private summer residence. It was damaged during WWII and was used as barracks for the Nazi army, but was never destroyed.

This would be an awesome place to see a play. Shakesepare in the Park, anyone?

We look well-rested and well-groomed, right?

After wandering for a few hours, we walked up towards the Old Town to catch up with our usual favourite, the walking tour. Obligatory shot of Walk and Don't Walk signs - I love how many varieties there are in the world! This isn't something that would have occurred to me before this year abroad.

The Old Town of Warsaw is a fascinating mix of new and old - while you can walk around and see all of these beautiful buildings, it's a replica, because the city was completely destroyed during World War II. This destruction happened partly due to regular wartime damage, and mainly as punishment for the Warsaw Uprising. By 1944 the city was razed to the ground (over 90% of buildings leveled) and 800,000 civilians (including noncombattants, women and children) were killed - almost 60% of the pre-war population.

Here's what Warsaw looked like after World War II:

Photo credit: http://pressmania.pl/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/warszawa.jpg

So how did they rebuild so precisely when so little was left? In the 1700's, there was a Venetian painter named Bernardo Bellotto (who sometimes went by the surname Canaletto, which was his mentor and uncle's surname) who became the court painter to King Stanislaw, who was the King of Poland and last Grand Duke of the Polish-Lithuania commonwealth, and who was a real patron of the arts. Canaletto excelled in photo-realistic landscape paintings, and had painted much of the city of Warsaw. They were able to use these paintings to reconstruct the Old Town. This reconstruction was done mostly from the 1950's to the 1970's.

One neat story about these paintings - Canaletto was once commissioned to paint a portrait of a famous noblewoman. Being someone who prized accuracy and details, he painted her as she looked, rather than making her look as beautiful as possible. Insulted, she refused to pay him. When he was painting her neighbourhood, he exacted subtle revenge by adding a rooftop statue to her home that wasn't there in real life. In a twist he could not have possible predicted, when the city was rebuilt this statue was replicated as well! More on that later.

Here are some pictures of Castle Square of Old Town.

So picturesque! As with all modern European cities, mixing the old and the new is a common challenge. I found Warsaw did a great job at 'hiding' the everyday necessities of a modern metropolis, unless you were looking for them. For example, here's the Royal Castle, from the middle of the Castle Square:

And here it is from the side:

Getting lucky, as we so often did on this trip (see more gorgeous blue skies?), we were there at the perfect time for the free Sunday entry to the Palace. The castle has been reconstructed beautifully. If it knocks my socks off today, I can't imagine how impressive it was in its heyday! It was dynamited by the Nazis and reduced to rubble, but between art historians who risked their lives to save pieces of art and examples of flooring and walls, and the Nazis looting the best pieces of art and furniture, a lot of it has been restored. The restoration was actually funded by the Polish people, because the Russian government (who helped pay to restore the rest of the city post-war) wasn't in favour of restoring a castle and the memory of kings, rather than promoting communism.

Nikolaus Copernicus, the Polish mathematician and astronomer who discerned that the Earth orbited the Sun. While I was looking up how to spell his first name, I fell in love with this paragraph in his Wikipedia article, which is totally worth reading: "...A polyglot and a polymath who obtained a doctorate in canon law and also practiced as a physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat and economist." Damn Copernicus, why do you have to make the rest of us look bad?

I loved the floors in this palace (every palace we've been in has had exquisite floors, but I think this one had my favourites)

This is the Chamber of European Monarchs/Conference Room. While my picture is focused on the floor, the room was dedicated to large portraits of the seven other rulers of Europe who were the King's contemporaries. They include the Kings of England, Austria, France, Sweden, and Prussia, Pope Pius VI, and Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, with whom Stanislaw had an affair before she ascended to her throne.

Why yes, that is a royal seal of a snake eating a baby on this painting, why do you ask? Apparently it was the heraldic charge of the Polish Queen Consort Bona Sforza, and is associated with the Duchy of Milan, where this Queen hailed from.

I am always underwhelmed by the beds in royal chambers. This just doesn't look that comfortable!

This is the Throne Room

While this is the Audience Chamber. So different!

The basement for some reason was very impressive to me. This used to be the deputies' chamber, and was later used as army barracks. Today it is painted in watercolours on a sandstone-like surface, and is really subtle and beautiful.

These painted curtains all have individualized draping, and you can see glimpses of the 'underside' of the fabric!

Old Polish organ

Outside of the castle, our tour guide told us about Sigismund's Column (you can see it in the pictures above), which was built in 1644 to remember the King of the same name who moved the capital to Warsaw. That's a fun bit of history about Warsaw - it wasn't always the capital of Poland! Krakow was the capital for a long time, until Poland and Lithuania created a union. Warsaw was equidistant from Krakow and Vilno (Vilnius), so it became the new capital in 1569. Krakow residents still resent Warsaw for 'stealing' their capital, and Warsaw residents are patronizing towards the 'little, backwater' Krakow. Our tour guides in both cities enjoyed telling us stories about how much better their hometown was! The Warsaw guide also told us about a local legend, that if Sigismund's sword ever touched the ground the city would fall. Obvious it was destroyed in WWII - the original pieces of the column lie in the Castle courtyard and, like so much of this city, what you see today is a replica.

We then walked through some of the streets of Old Town, enjoying the varied architecture and decorations.

We stopped for a bit in Canon Square. This is a tiny square that was very desirable to live on, as it was right next to a major cathedral. It was decided to tax the residents based on their square frontage. One very enterprising person found a way to beat that system. Here's an overview of the square:

You can't see it from the picture above, but there's a house in the corner between the peach house on the left that is two windows wide, and the green house on the right which is three windows wide. Don't believe me?

The best part? By inside area, that's the largest house on the square! Let's go around to the back (remember that thin house is peach/pink coloured):

Way to avoid paying those taxes, 17th century Trump

The bell in the centre of the square is said to make a wish come true for anyone who circles three times around it while hopping on one foot. Now, while checking up on this online (two months after it happened), I don't see a lot of mention of hopping on one foot, so I suspect our tour guide was putting us on. Oh well, at least it was fun!

Next stop was the Barbican, which was a defensive position on the city wall.

Old Town Market Square holds a mermaid statue, paying tribute to the coat of arms of Warsaw that dates back to at least the 14th century. Some people say that this mermaid and the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen are sisters that were separated. Either way, this one doesn't sitting around looking forlorn!

This is the coat of arms on the police cruisers in town

We then walked around talking about more architecture. Can you guess in the picture below which statue Canaletto added to the painting of that rich (and apparently ugly) woman's house?

Copernicus monument - the entire circle is a model of the solar system with the orbits of the different planets. Neat!

I was originally surprised that there was a Nazi Reichstadler (Eagle) left on this building (see our Berlin Post for more info). Looking into it, a white eagle with winds outstretched and head turned to the right has been a symbol of Poland since at least the late 990's. It was still pretty shocking to see though!

One presumes these statues were all here originally, but who knows?

The tour ended with some discussion about the Jewish Ghetto and the Warsaw Uprising. Historically, Poland had a huge Jewish population due to religious tolerance - in the middle of the 1500's nearly 75% of the world's population of Jews lived in Poland. Between the 1700's and 1900's, a waning in tolerance lead to some of them moving elsewhere. Obviously, WWII had a huge and lasting change on that population. They were forced into tiny ghettos and walled off, limited to rations that were not survivable (in Warsaw in 1941 a Jewish adult was allowed 250 kcal, an adult gentile was given 670 kcal, and a German adult got over 2,500 kcal per day), and subjected to terrible crowding. The ghetto held 30% of the population of the city in just 2.4% of its surface area. They fell victim to starvation, disease, and then obviously murder at the hands of Nazi Germany. Nearly 3 million Polish Jews were killed, or 90% of the country's population of Jews. To this day, for a variety of reasons, the Polish Jewish population is a small fraction of what it used to be - sources vary from 3,000 to 50,000 total. There are a lot of memorials for them in Warsaw. We saw two of them - a representation of the size of the Warsaw Ghetto, and a permanent marker where the wall used to be.

The last thing we saw on the tour was a monument to the Warsaw Uprising. This was a huge battle in 1944 in which the Polish Home Army in Warsaw tried to drive out the Nazis as the Soviet army approached from the east. However, the Soviets didn't make it to the city, which left the Polish soldiers and citizens cut off and on their own. They fought for 63 days. 16,000 soldiers and up to 200,000 civilians were killed or executed in the aftermath. The buildings of Warsaw that had survived the original invasion were either destroyed during this battle, or purposely destroyed by the Nazis in its aftermath as punishment.

The monument to the Warsaw uprising is in front of the Polish Supreme Court. It's really dramatic, with statues of soldiers coming up out of sewer grates (as they did during the battle), and includes civilians such as a woman with a baby. You can see the wider shot as we walked away - there is another group of statues on the other side of the square.

On the other side of the Supreme Court, part of the building is held up by these caryatids (female figures that are also architectural supports) that represent faith, hope, and love.

So that was a pretty neat tour, with a lot to see and think about. After so many hours on our feet, we were super hungry and looking for something filling. We found an awesome pierogi place that really fit the bill! It didn't look like much inside, but the food and drinks were excellent.

Guess which ones are the spicy pierogis?

Dessert dumplings! Where have you been all my life?

We had interesting drinks - fruit kompote (stewed fruit) and 'bread acid' which was a fermented yeast drink.

We did some shopping, and then for dinner, we went to a milk bar for a very interesting experience! These milk bars were opened during communist Soviet occupation of Poland, and provide hearty food in exchange for a small amount of money - no more and no less. It's cafeteria style, and a little daunting for foreigners. You line up to place your order (the entire place operates in Polish, so we had to use some Google Translate in line and still were wondering what we'd ordered!) and pay the woman at the front, then the cooks call out your order at a window. The food available is listed on the board at the front - when they run out of a dish, they take the price down. We ended up with a coffee for Justin (the translation was 'cereal coffee' whatever that means) and kefir (cultured yogurt drink) for me, a borscht (beet) soup with pasta, more pierogis, and some sausages. All this for the princely sum of less than $4 Canadian! The milk bars used to be full of mostly students and poor people, but it seemed pretty diverse when we were in there. One woman even brought about 10 tupperwares and took the food back home!

What you want?

Since our dinner was so inexpensive, we finished off with cocktails at one of the hotels across from the bus station, with a nice sunset view of the Palace of Culture and Science, which at 42 stories is the tallest building in Poland.

The next day, we had a lovely brunch at an outdoor patio before we set out for more sightseeing.

Justin disagrees, but I'm pretty sure those are just hot dogs rather than kielbasa

Next, we visited the Warsaw University Gardens. I'd read that we should try and go there, but I wasn't expecting to be so blown away. These rooftop botanical gardens are free and open to the public, and range over a lawn and all the way up and across the entire roof. I can't imagine how much it cost to implement and maintain; all I know is that it's breathtaking. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. All roofs wish they could be like this when they grow up.