At the beginning, there was a poor province called Mazovia (Mazowsze). For a few centuries it was Poland’s wild east, an autonomous area. Eventually, it was located in the middle of the largest country in 16th century Europe: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. King Sigismund, who is commemorated on the huge column in front of the castle, finally moved the capital of this country there. Warsaw is a site of some extraordinary events and home to some extraordinary people.

The second-oldest constitution in the world was written right here? It also was the location of the 18th most decisive battle in human history: when the Bolsheviks were stopped from marching to the west, giving Poland and the rest of Europe some 20 years of peace. It is the place where you can hear the music of Chopin on several benches placed on the main streets. It is a place with the traits of the only woman to receive the Nobel Prize in two different fields: Marie Sklodowska-Curie. A place where it was not strange to speak Esperanto, as its inventor, Ludwig Zamenhof, was a Varsovian. Mr Zamenhof was also a Polish Jew, one of the more than 300,000 who lived in Warsaw before the Second World War – the largest Jewish city in Europe at the time.

But that Warsaw doesn’t exist anymore. It was changed completely by the Second World War and the Holocaust, as depicted in the famous film The Pianist by Roman Polanski, which is actually based on a true story. After the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, the entire area was flattened. The people of Warsaw were shocked, but they did not realize that only one year later, all of Warsaw will share the fate of the ghetto. To punish the city for its anti-Nazi uprising, Hitler ordered that the Polish capital be flattened.
Without understanding these two tragedies, it is not possible to understand the city and its proud citizens.

Warsaw’s Old Town as you see it today was almost totally rebuilt after the war, mostly based on 18th century paintings. But the people of Warsaw did such a meticulous job rebuilding it from scratch that the Old Town was honoured with a place on the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980.

This city symbolizes the spirit of the Polish people: sometimes maybe too romantic and heroic, from time to time a bit too reckless, but always willing to stand firm and fight. It symbolizes the tragic history of Poland – an endless struggle to withstand invasions, including those conducted by the most bloody totalitarian regimes in history, and, just like a phoenix, rising time and again from the ashes.