This week’s travel dream: Warsaw reincarnated

“Burned, bombed, and dynamited to rubble,” the Warsaw that remained after World War II was a mere shadow of the glamorous city it had been before, said Steve Dougherty in The New York Times. A “beautiful city at the heart of a fruited plain,” Warsaw had no mountains or oceans to protect it from the Nazi blitzkrieg that ignited World War II on Sept. 1, 1939. Poland’s “grand, glittering, and vibrant prewar capital” was the “first city Hitler bombed” as his troops struck eastward, and would be “the last that he destroyed” as his armies retreated. When the war ended, Warsaw was only a “corpse of its former self.”

I went in search of the rich history buried by the war. Even today, one can get a sense of the city that once was, in Warsaw’s “leafy boulevards, grand ballrooms, romantic cafes, lively salons,” and hidden backstreets. Following the war, the Polish determined to reclaim “their capital from death’s dominion,” and rebuilt their city brick by brick. Using “everything from oil paintings to postcards, news photos, and old family albums” as visual guides, they meticulously restored the medieval Old Town Market Square and the nearby 15th-century New Town. Though “virtually everything” in Warsaw’s historic districts today is a re-creation, there are plenty of places—both new and old—that “conjure its glorious past.”

In the center of the city, the elegant Hotel Europejski, which once played host to “great balls and glittering banquets,” is again a portrait of “neoclassical magnificence.” Its kitchen now houses the refined restaurant U Kucharzy, while cafes on its ground floor offer views of Pilsudski Square. Ujazdowska Avenue’s row of foreign embassies, though worn by age, still evokes its days as the “Champs-Élysées of Warsaw.” Just east of the Vistula River sits a district called Praga, where some of the city’s oldest buildings still stand. At one time a “rundown neighborhood of tenement buildings and abandoned chocolate and vodka factories,” it’s now home to the city’s coolest bars, cafes, and restaurants. Praga thus offers both the “most accurate view” of Warsaw before 1945 and a glimpse of its recent revitalization. Contact: Warsawtour.pl

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