Warsaw
The capital. The Old Town rebuilt from rubble and photographs, the Palace of Culture, the modern skyline, and a city that was eighty-five per cent destroyed.
Part of Poland
10 moments in this segment.
- - Capital Moves to Warsaw. 1596. Sigismund III Vasa moves the royal residence from Kraków to Warsaw, closer to the Polish-Lithuanian centre after the Union of Lublin. Kraków remains the coronation city; Warsaw becomes the political capital.
- - Miracle on the Vistula. August 13-25, 1920. Polish counter-offensive at the Battle of Warsaw repels the Red Army from the suburbs of the Polish capital. ~25,000 Soviet dead, 60,000+ captured. Stopped the Bolshevik westward push; preserved interwar European order for 19 years.
- - Gdynia Built from Scratch. 1922-1939. Poland builds the port city of Gdynia on the Baltic, a substitute for Gdańsk (Danzig) which remained a Free City under League of Nations rule. Symbol of interwar Polish national construction.
- - Warsaw Ghetto Sealed. November 16, 1940. The Germans seal off the Warsaw Ghetto, at peak, ~460,000 Jews in 3.4 km². The largest Nazi ghetto. ~92,000 die from starvation and disease before deportations to Treblinka begin (July 22, 1942).
- - Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. April 19 - May 16, 1943. The largest Jewish revolt of the Holocaust. ~700 fighters hold off the SS for nearly a month before the ghetto is razed. ~13,000 Jews killed during the uprising; the rest deported to Treblinka.
- - Warsaw Uprising. August 1 - October 2, 1944. Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) launches a 63-day uprising against the German occupation. Soviet forces wait across the Vistula. ~200,000 dead; Warsaw razed by Germans in reprisal. The defining Polish wartime trauma.
- - Poland Hosts Euro 2012. June 2012. Poland (with Ukraine) hosts UEFA Euro 2012. National Stadium in Warsaw built; major infrastructure modernisation. Symbolic moment of Poland's "normal European country" arrival.
- - Warsaw Uprising at Eighty. Warsaw marks eighty years since the 1944 uprising, with ceremonies honouring those who fought and the civilians killed in the city's destruction. The anniversary remains the most heavily observed date in the capital's calendar.
- - Palace of Culture Turns Seventy. The Palace of Culture and Science, a Soviet gift to Warsaw and still the most argued-over building in the city, reaches its seventieth year. A walk through the landmark and the mixed feelings Poles hold about it.
- - Remembrance Network at Twenty. Culture minister Hanna Wróblewska speaks in Warsaw at the twentieth anniversary of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, the Poland-based body set up to build a shared European conversation about the twentieth century.
