Warsaw
Poland's capital, a city rebuilt from ruins
Warsaw is a city that refused to disappear. Reduced to rubble by the Nazis in 1944, its old town was painstakingly rebuilt brick by brick from old paintings and drawings, and today the pastel facades of the market square look centuries old though most are barely seventy. Around them rises a strikingly modern capital — glass towers, the Soviet-gift Palace of Culture, broad reconstructed boulevards. The political and economic heart of Poland, Warsaw straddles the Vistula River with a metro-area population near three million.
The city sits on both banks of the Vistula, Poland's longest river, on the flat Masovian Plain in the east-central part of the country, at an average elevation of about 100 metres. The left bank rises on a low escarpment above the river, where the old town and most landmarks stand, while the right-bank district of Praga occupies lower ground. A continental climate brings cold, snowy winters and warm summers, and green parks and the riparian forests along the Vistula soften the dense city.
Warsaw grew from a Masovian fishing settlement into a ducal seat, and rose to national prominence after 1596, when King Sigismund III moved the royal court here from Kraków. It became capital of independent Poland in 1918, suffered catastrophic destruction in the Second World War, and was rebuilt under communism and again transformed after 1989. Today Warsaw is Poland's capital and largest city, a fast-growing business hub and a powerful symbol of national resilience.