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History
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For a capital city, Warsaw entered history late. Although there are records of a settlement here from the tenth century, the first references to anything resembling a town at this point on the Wisla date from around the mid-fourteenth century. It owes its initial rise to power to the Mazovian ruler
Janusz the Elder
, who made Warsaw his main residence in 1413 and developed it as capital of the Duchy of Mazovia. Following the death of the last Mazovian prince in 1526, Mazovia and its now greatly enlarged capital were incorporated into
Polish
royal territory. The city's fortunes now improved rapidly. Following the Act of Union with Lithuania, the Sejm - the Polish parliament - voted to transfer to Warsaw in 1569. The first election of a Polish king took place here four years later, and then in 1596 came the crowning glory, when
King Sigismund III
moved his capital two hundred miles from KrakA?w to its current location - a decision chiefly compelled by the shift in Poland's geographical centre after the union with Lithuania.
Capital status inevitably brought prosperity, but along with new wealth came new perils. The city was badly damaged by the Swedes during the invasion of 1655 - the first of several assaults - and was then extensively reconstructed by the Saxon kings in the late seventeenth century. The lovely OgrA?d Saski (Saxon Gardens), in the centre of Warsaw, date from this period, for example. Poles tend to remember the eighteenth century in a nostalgic haze as the golden age of Warsaw, when its concert halls, theatres and salons were prominent in European cultural life. The Partitions abruptly terminated this era, as Warsaw was absorbed into Prussia in 1795. Napoleon's arrival in 1806 gave Varsovians brief hopes of liberation, but the collapse of his Moscow campaign spelled the end of those hopes, and, following the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Warsaw was integrated into the Russian-controlled Congress Kingdom of Poland . The failure of the 1830 Uprising brought severe reprisals: Warsaw was relegated to the status of "provincial town" and all Polish institutes and places of learning were closed. It was only with the outbreak of World War I that Russian control began to crumble, and late in 1914 the Germans occupied the city, remaining until the end of the war. Following the return of Polish independence, Warsaw reverted to its position as capital; but then, with the outbreak of World War II , came the progressive annihilation of the city. The Nazi assault in September 1939 was followed by round-ups, executions and deportations - savagery directed above all at the Jewish community, who were crammed into a tiny ghetto area and forced to live on a near-starvation diet. It was the Jews who instigated the first open revolt, the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, which resulted in the wholesale destruction of Warsaw's six-centuries-old Jewish community. As the war progressed and the wave of German defeats on the eastern front provoked a tightening of the Nazi grip on Warsaw, resistance stiffened in the city. In August 1944, virtually the whole civilian population participated in the Warsaw Uprising , an attempt both to liberate the city and ensure the emergence of an independent Poland. It failed on both counts. Hitler, infuriated by the resistance, ordered the total elimination of Warsaw and, with the surviving populace driven out of the city, the SS systematically destroyed the remaining buildings. In one of his final speeches to the Reichstag, Hitler was able to claim with satisfaction that Warsaw was now no more than a name on the map of Europe. By the end of the war, 850,000 Varsovians - two-thirds of the city's 1939 population - were dead or missing. Photographs taken immediately after the liberation in January 1945 show a scene not unlike Hiroshima: General Eisenhower described Warsaw as the most tragic thing he'd ever seen.
The momentous task of
rebuilding
the city took ten years. Aesthetically the results were mixed, with acres of socialist functionalism spread between the Baroque palaces, but it was a tremendous feat of national reconstruction nonetheless. The recovery that has brought the population up to 1.7 million, exceeding its prewar level, is, however, marred by a silence: that of the exterminated Jewish community. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Poland,
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