It isn’t too difficult to imagine a world in which the reconstruction of Warsaw after World War II was done in such a way to make the city centre indistinguishable from every other concrete jungle in eastern Europe. Indeed, large swathes of the city seems to be done in the stereotypical brutalist style with wide streets and a fair amount of greenery between the tower blocks, which was no doubt supposed to be highly efficient but doesn’t make for the most interesting visiting experience. For my visit, I was staying near the university on the southwest side of the city but it was straightforward to head into the city centre on the excellent tram network that I made use of most nights. There was also an underground metro although I had very little experience with that. The tram led past the towering Palace of Science and Culture with its distinct Stalinist style that has come, for better or worse, to be symbolic of Warsaw and its relatively recent Communist past. However, it was surrounded by the glass and steel skyscrapers of the capitalist present and the city centre seemed to be a hive of construction activity.

With a free afternoon, I made my way on the tram to the stop outside the National Museum (Muzeum Narodowe) but sadly did not have time to venture inside. Instead, I disembarked the tram, which necessitates crossing a very busy road as there was no pedestrian underpass at that tram stop, then headed northwards along Nowy Świat. This road forms part of the old Royal Route that linked Warsaw Castle with the Wilanów Palace of the Sobieksi Kings of Poland to the south. There are some good sights along this road before even reaching the core zone of the WHS, including the Presidential Palace and Holy Cross Church. The latter is where the heart of Frédéric Chopin is buried (the rest of his body is in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris) and on another day I was able to attend a recital of Chopin’s music in a small venue nearby. These appear to still be carrying on (the business is named Chopin Point) but have moved to a different building, which is a shame because there was something magical about hearing Chopin’s music in the room where the man himself had performed. Elsewhere in the city, I visited the Curie Museum, which was rather small but an excellent collection from the life and work of the great chemist and I would highly recommend to anybody interested in the history of science.

Approaching from the south, the first part of the core zone one comes to is Castle Square, which is dominated by the grand red Royal Castle on one side. Like pretty much everything else in the core zone, the original castle was levelled to the ground as a Nazi reprisal for the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. After the war was over, this cultural vandalism was thankfully reversed and the castle, along with the rest of the historic centre of the city, was painstakingly rebuilt brick by brick. Where possible, the building materials were salvaged from the rubble to reconstruct the various monuments from their original material. In the centre of the square stands a recreation of Sigismund’s Column, with pieces of the original granite column lying broken on their side to the side of the castle. The figure at the top is Sigismund III Vasa, the King of Poland who moved the capital to Warsaw from Krakow in 1596. From the square, the brick walls of the old city extend around to the west and north and mark roughly the edge of the inscribed core zone. The eastern edge is less impressively delineated by a large six-lane road, beyond which lies the River Vistula. Within this area lies what would otherwise be a pleasant but fairly unremarkable European city – full of narrow streets with old houses with delightful hanging baskets full of flowers. Many of these homes are now instead various business, predominantly geared towards visiting tourists and a lot of different restaurants. The central market square (pictured) was the worst for this, enjoyable to look at but difficult to walk through without being approached asking if I wanted to stop for pizza, ice cream, and so on. There are a number of churches and some impressive towers on the walls but there is nothing particularly stand-out until you remember this was basically a pile of rubble within some people’s lifetime. It would take a keen eye to tell this was not an original historic city of the sort that you can see in many other places in Europe and that is what makes Warsaw so incredible. I was told that even the interiors of some of the buildings were recreations of the pre-war originals. It was only through the amazingly dedicated work of the local population that the destruction of the heart of the city was almost entirely undone in a way unprecedented in modern times. No doubt we had all hoped such rebuilding efforts would never be needed again but events in Ukraine remind us that we are never at the end of history. Despite the ongoing barbarity at the time of writing this review, the reconstruction of Warsaw is a powerful testament to the resilience of people and their culture.