Warsaw, Poland

Warsaw is the capital of Poland and the nation's economic, cultural, and political center. Warsaw was nearly wiped out during World War II, when more than 90 percent of the city was destroyed. The postwar era saw the reconstruction of Warsaw's historic center. As the result of the 1989 collapse of communism, Warsaw experienced an economic and cultural resurgence. Warsaw has emerged as one of Eastern Europe's most prosperous and cosmopolitan cities in the early twenty-first century.

Landscape

Warsaw is situated in east-central Poland on both banks of the Vistula River. The city's key commercial districts and most of its historic landmarks are concentrated on the western bank. The area along the eastern bank, known as Praga, consists primarily of residential areas, but has attracted increasing development.

Warsaw is divided into eighteen districts covering a total area of 517 square kilometers (199 square miles). The Śródmieście district, on the Vistula's western bank, contains Warsaw's downtown. To the north of the Śródmieście district, at the end of the Warsaw's main thoroughfare known as the Royal Way, is Old Town, which runs the length of the city to its southern boundary. Many of the capital's most important palaces, monuments, and churches, as well as most foreign embassies, are located along Royal Way.

Despite its historical problems with congestion and pollution, Warsaw is a remarkably green city. Large areas of the capital consist of undeveloped natural land or city parks. It also enjoys a temperate climate. Summertime temperatures range from 14 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit) to 24 degrees Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit), while in winter they average between –6 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit) and 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit).

Like most countries, Poland has been affected by climate change. Longer-lasting droughts, rising temperatures, and more frequent and powerful storms have plagued the country. The Warsaw International Mechanism was established in 2013 to discuss and prepare for the long-term consequences of climate change. The 2015 UN Climate Change Conference was held in Warsaw.

People

With an estimated 1.795 million inhabitants (2022 estimate), Warsaw is Poland's largest city. The fall of communism and the subsequent building boom has drawn many Poles from other regions of the country, particularly rural areas, to the capital in pursuit of economic opportunities. In the early twenty-first century, this trend cooled as the Warsaw job and housing markets tightened.

Most of Warsaw's residents are ethnically Polish and Roman Catholic. The city once had a thriving Jewish community consisting of nearly 400,000 members, or around 30 percent of the capital's total population. This community was wiped out when the Nazis deported and then murdered most of Warsaw's Jews in concentration camps, including the camp at Treblinka, located just 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Warsaw.

Economy

Poland's transition to a stable, democratic government and a free-market economy has spurred an enormous amount of foreign investment in Warsaw since the 1990s. Foreign-owned corporations financed much of the city's construction as the capital's commercial and residential real estate markets struggled to keep pace with constantly growing demand in the early twenty-first century.

Warsaw's increasingly global economic clout is reflected in the Warsaw Stock Exchange, which reopened in 1991 after a fifty-year hiatus under communism. Many of the transactions at the Warsaw Stock Exchange are based on foreign capital, and the Warsaw Stock Exchange is the largest market in the region. In 2013, the Warsaw Stock Exchange joined the United Nation's Sustainable Stock Exchanges initiative. In addition to the corporate headquarters of the most important Polish banks, insurance companies and other businesses—many of them international conglomerates such as Coca-Cola and General Motors—maintain branch offices in Warsaw.

Warsaw's transition from a state-run to a free-enterprise system has been accompanied by a shift toward a more services-oriented economy from the city's previously industry-driven economy. Following World War II, Poland's communist government transformed Warsaw into a major center for the production of cars, tractors, and steel.

The manufacturing sector—particularly in the automotive, advanced technology, and food-processing industries—represents a significant component of Warsaw's economy, although the percentage of workers employed in factories has declined significantly since when the city was under communist control. Almost three-quarters of the capital's working population were employed in the services sector in the early twenty-first century. This industrial growth has led to a steady rise in Warsaw's GDP throughout the twenty-first century, contributing about 12 percent to Poland's total income. Warsaw has a very low unemployment rate at just 2.9 percent.

Warsaw's billion-dollar tourism industry provides another key source of revenue. The capital attracts several million foreign visitors each year, primarily from Western Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Landmarks

Warsaw's two most famous landmarks illustrate the existence of an Old World legacy amid the relics of Poland's communist era. Old Town's cobblestone streets and magnificent seventeenth-century-style buildings were meticulously reconstructed following World War II. Encircling Old Town is a double-layered brick wall—also carefully restored to its original state—featuring several watchtowers and two entrance gates positioned at the circle's north and south ends.

Standing in sharp contrast to the Baroque splendors of Old Town is Warsaw's other premier landmark: the Palace of Culture, a controversial 1950s gift to the city of Warsaw from Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The palace's massive proportions—it contains more than 3,000 rooms and towers some 234 meters (750 feet) in height—reflect its builders' socialist-realist aesthetic, as do the forty enormous sandstone statues that loom over the palace.

Warsaw features a number of magnificent, older palace complexes and castles. These include the seventeenth-century Blue Palace, originally purchased by a king as a gift for his daughter; the Palace on the Water, a former royal summer residence built on an islet in the middle of a lake in Warsaw's Lazienki Park; the seventeenth-century Presidential Palace, which has served as Poland's executive residence since 1994; and Old Town's Royal Castle, rebuilt during the 1970s as an exact replica of the original Baroque structure that was destroyed during World War II.

Warsaw's Catholic heritage is reflected in the capital's elaborate churches. The Capuchin Church of the Transfiguration is famous for its possession of a sarcophagus containing the heart of King Jan III Sobieski, while the Church of the Holy Cross, which was heavily damaged by World War II fighting that actually took place within its walls, is the burial site of the composer Frédéric Chopin's heart. More than 1,000 people died in the Church of the Nuns of the Holy Sacrament when the Nazis bombed it in retaliation for the nuns' decision to shelter war refugees and wounded resistance fighters. The original Baroque interior of the fifteenth-century St. Anne's Church survived World War II. The Gothic-style St. John's Cathedral, the oldest church in Warsaw, was used by insurgents as a base during the war and was therefore destroyed by the Germans. It was later rebuilt.

Warsaw is home to many monuments that commemorate significant people and events in the city's past. The most famous include King Sigismund's Column, a gilded bronze statue 22 meters (72 feet) in height that has towered over Castle Square since 1644, the Chopin monument in a rose garden at Lazienki Park, the Old Town Square's Mermaid Monument (the mermaid has served as a symbol of Warsaw since the Renaissance era), the Monument of the Warsaw Uprising, which honors those who died in the Polish Army's 1944 campaign to halt the destruction of Warsaw by the retreating Nazis, and the Umschlagplatz Monument, a railroad freight-car-shaped memorial to all the Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

Warsaw is also home to numerous museums. The Historical Museum of Warsaw documents the so-called "Seven Ages" of Warsaw's history. The National Museum houses a collection of Polish art from the fourteenth century through the twentieth century. The Poster Museum at Wilanów Palace and the Center for Contemporary Art in Ujazdów Castle are also popular attractions.

History

Warsaw traces its origins to the end of the thirteenth century when the duchy of Mazovia established a new settlement on the site of present-day Warsaw. In 1526, Mazovia was annexed by the Kingdom of Poland, and Warsaw quickly established itself as the kingdom's most important city. In the mid-sixteenth century, Warsaw was invaded and looted by Swedish and Transylvanian forces.

During the mid-1700s, Warsaw experienced a cultural golden age and underwent significant expansion and modernization. In 1795, Poland ceased to exist as a political entity when its territories were partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia.

In 1815, Warsaw was proclaimed the capital of a newly emergent Polish Kingdom, though it was still dominated by the Russian Empire. In 1918, Poland reestablished its sovereign independence and Warsaw was once again named the national capital.

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland quickly led to Warsaw's subjugation by Nazi forces—but also to the development of a fierce resistance movement. This resistance culminated in the Warsaw Uprising, an effort to expel the German occupation that lasted sixty-three days.

German reprisals were severe. By the end of war, nearly 90 percent of Warsaw lay in ruins, thanks to a systematic, street-by-street, structure-by-structure campaign of destruction carried out by the retreating Nazis.

The work of rebuilding Warsaw, virtually from scratch, began in 1945. Poland's postwar status as one of the Eastern bloc nations under Soviet domination led to many socialist-realist-style architectural additions to the city alongside the painstakingly faithful reconstruction of the city's historic center.

The 1989 fall of Poland's communist regime ushered in a new era of explosive economic growth, which is reflected in Warsaw's ongoing construction boom. It also transformed the Polish capital into one of Europe's fastest-growing cities. In 1995, Warsaw opened its first metro line; a second line was added in 2015. Poland's economic boom led to the country entering the European Union in 2004.

In 2004, the city opened the Warsaw Rising Museum in recognition of the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. In 2019, amid a rise of anti-Semitic attacks and hate speech in Poland, a group of Polish nationalists marched on the United States embassy in Warsaw to protest the US putting pressure on the Polish government to pay reparations to Polish Jews whose families lost property in the Holocaust.

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