Click the images for full-size versions!
I had elected not to pay Ryanair an extra £5 for a window seat, so my first actual look at Poland was from the cramped middle-seat view about fifteen seconds before we landed. A wide, flat landscape of strip farms was scattered with small, regularly spaced farmhouses, like an ultra-rarefied suburbia. The landing was inept and bouncy, but our Polish fellow travellers (who made up probably 90% of the flight) applauded our safe return to earth anyway. Modlin airport belongs in the same category of dishonestly-named airports as Venice Treviso, and is a tiny little thing: our plane was the only one on the tarmac, outside a stainless steel single-span building like a glorified Anderson shelter. The border control was direly undermanned (just like back home!) and several Hilarious Misunderstandings ensued regarding the right bus into town, but after three hours and various motor vehicles, we made it to the flat the Russians had booked for us all on the northern edge of Warsaw’s Old Town.
The Old Town mostly isn’t very old, because it – along with the rest of the city – was more or less completely erased in the Second World War, and although the reconstruction of 17th and 18th century buildings with 1950s materials and craftsmanship is faithful and appropriately decorative, it’s not quite convincing. But it’s clean and cheerful and full of life, with a Monastiraki-like vibe of happy people of all ages having fun into the night, and for dinner we found a restaurant doing astonishingly reasonable sausage and pierogi (although for some reason our waitress kept creasing up with laughter.) Strolling the Old Town itself we found a monument to, of all people, Herbert Hoover; I learned he was a key part of the American relief effort to the fledgling Poland after the Great War and is regarded as something of a national saviour around here. We walked past the replica royal palace and a statue of King Sigismund III on a column, and back around the rebuilt red brick city walls. Near the barbican is a statue of a child, perhaps ten or eleven, wearing a helmet with a red-and-white stripe and carrying a German submachine gun: all the more heartbreaking for knowing it wasn’t imagined.
We breakfasted on the same Old Town drag as the previous night’s dinner – a “sausage breakfast plate” included many kinds of ham and cheese along with the sausage for really not very much money. Misha inexplicably stirred some butter into his latte and claimed it was called a “bulletproof coffee.” On Sunday, the churches are actually full in this very Catholic country; bumper stickers in the foyer of the church we passed declared that God hates abortions in English and Polish. Every street was scattered with sparrows and tree-fluff.
The Old Town museum, subtitled “The Things of Warsaw,” was in the process of being refurbished, but the 30% of it currently operating was still deeply impressive. In the cellars, modern infographics cheerfully served up intriguing and hideous facts about Warsaw and quite how much it’s changed (and been knocked around) over the years; demographic charts with deep, deep cuts were accompanied by maps of modern Poland being overlapped by various sprawling forms of German and Russian empire, its modern boundaries bearing no relation to any of them.
The museum was one of those excellently constructed Museum of London style setups which provides the exact right balance of artefacts and information to make quite mundane facts interesting and relevant; the audioguide was superb. The buildings themselves – some of their fabric was original, and had survived 1944 – took centre stage at points. Highlights of the collection included some absolutely gorgeous silverware, some quite bad portraiture and dozens of different stylised portrayals of the Warsaw mermaid, which I didn’t know before today was the city’s emblem. When we emerged into the light, the barrel organ man with a real parrot had been replaced by a pair of puppeteers rather desperately jiggling their papier-mache Beatles to random rock music. Also in the Old Town are an externally gorgeous but internally austere (which is surely the wrong way round for Jesuits) Jesuit church, and the glorious raw gothic Bazylika Archikatedralna, a wonder of redbrick and whitewash, the walls lined with memorials to WW2 fighter squadrons and a side chapel dominated by a big, furious wooden eagle freed from its chains. More anti-abortion propaganda filled the lobby.
Down by the river, Warsaw University Library was an utterly unexpected, utterly delightful creation and one of those rare modern buildings which is both aesthetically and functionally perfect – a huge complex of tarnished copper and pale green paint carefully constructed so the gardens of its grounds almost flow over it, with trellis and wire arches built to encourage greenery around the louvred AC vents and over the glazed domes. It doesn’t feel natural, not in the least, but like a very careful combination of nature and artifice bringing out the best in each other. The grounds were full of dust-bathing sparrows, glossy starlings and big grey crows, and through the peepholes and skylights we could see students at their desks.
We wandered down the bank of the Vistula, looking briefly at the Copernicus science museum – it looked fun, but it was at this point 5pm, and we have science back home, so we instead headed through the Old Town towards Saxon Park, apparently the oldest public urban park in Europe. The big open expanse of Saxon Square has housed various buildings from various oppressors: a magnate’s palace, a Prussian headquarters, a Russian cathedral (only completed in 1913, looted and burned during the war and pulled down five years later). Now there is, very pointedly, nothing, except a small bit of surviving colonnade, which houses Poland’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Two soldiers guard an Eternal Flame, and grey granite panels are lined with places and dates; most of the places within Polish territory, most of the wars either existential struggles, or fought by Poles for a Poland which didn’t then exist.
Not that Warsaw lacks occupation buildings. The Palace of Culture, a giant Stalinist skyscraper much like the Seven Sisters in Moscow (it’s as high as Moscow State University, although looks smaller) looms over a downtown area unmistakeably Soviet in its vast open spaces, grid pattern and monolithic, regularly spaced tower blocks. The building itself is, of course, gorgeous in the Stalinist style, its interiors filled with electric chandeliers, gleaming brass fittings and off-white marble cladding. A lift whisked us up to the observation deck the on the thirtieth floor, where three facts became absolutely clear: this ancient city genuinely has no old buildings; Poland is very, very flat; and Warsaw is huge. The Old Town, which hitherto had been our entire point of reference, was a tiny cluster of red roofs lost in square white tower blocks, which themselves faded out into a wooded horizon.
A tram took us back to the Old Town, where we had various Polish meats at a restaurant with swinging seats, and a Russian family brought their own KFC next to us to round off the evening in surreal style.
Warsaw Old Town – Poznan & Citadel – Poznan Museums, Wroclaw by night – Things of Wroclaw – The long road south – Zakopanorama – Krakow & Wawel