The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Why Warsaw is Europe’s most exciting city
Affordable, efficient and buzzing, the Polish captial is having a moment. But can its capital compete in the city-break stakes? Orlando Bird finds out
The Palace of Culture and Science, which looms out of the centre of Warsaw, was once among the tallest buildings in the world. A “gift” to the city from Stalin in the 1950s, and built in the state-approved style, it resembles a Soviet answer to the Chrysler Building, though without the art deco sleekness. It is hulking, forbidding: this is not, you feel, the architecture of the good guys. Soon after it opened, people began throwing themselves off it.
Today, you can walk in there and go to the cinema, check out an exhibition, buy some books. Or you can do as I did recently and sit outside (in the sun, no less) with a spritz. Visitors take the lift to the top so they can post Instagram reels of the skyline, which is increasingly dominated by glinting glass – a Google outpost here, a law firm office there, with a Hoxton-esque smattering of rooftop cocktail spots in between. And Stalin’s citadel is no longer the biggest beast in town. Last year it was overtaken by Norman Foster’s Varso Tower (as, indeed, was the Shard). Welcome to Warsaw in 2023.
Poland, you might have noticed, is having a moment. After all the jibes when it joined the EU in 2004, it has become a major player on the Continent – a pugnacious supporter of Ukraine and a favourite of the Americans, with a fast-growing economy. There’s talk that it could be richer than Britain by 2030. Warsaw has been the driving force behind this change. So when, on top of everything else, it was voted Europe’s best tourist destination earlier in the year, I wanted to experience it for myself. Could it really compete with Paris and Rome, Amsterdam and Prague, in the city-break stakes?
I was curious for another reason, too. Some of my family came from this part of the world. A century ago my maternal great-grandmother, Sadie Schiffman, emigrated to London from Pultusk, a rural town not far north of Warsaw – and for a time, like Poland’s capital, almost 40 per cent Jewish. Things were bad when she left (at that point the Russians were the chief tormentors). But, of course, she escaped the worst. By the end of the Second World War, 90 per cent of Poland’s 3.3million Jews – including her relatives who stayed – had been murdered by the Nazis. She didn’t talk much about her homeland. My mother remembers her taking the family to see Fiddler on the Roof at the cinema, that was about it.
History certainly hangs heavy in Warsaw – all those years of people doing terrible things to each other (and to the place itself: Hitler wanted to obliterate it, and nearly succeeded). But while the city is still coming to terms with its past, and the recent national election reflected deep rifts in the wider population after eight years of combative Law and Justice rule, it possesses a quality rare in European capitals these days: excitement about the future. It may not be beautiful, exactly, but it is buzzy, rich in cultural history and cheaper than Berlin. And I’m reliably informed it is at its crisp and atmospheric best in the autumn.
I was staying at the Hotel Bristol – an art nouveau gem left to gather dust by the communists, then reopened by Margaret Thatcher in 1993, and an ideal base for exploring. My first stop, nearby, was the Old Town. At first glance you could mistake it for a standard-issue European city centre, all high pastel façades, busy squares and roving accordionists. The difference is that most of it was built after the Second World War, reconstructed to look as it had done in better days. There’s something distinctly Polish about this (it also happened in Gdansk). Shattering trauma comes up against stubborn pride, and stubborn pride wins out.
While you’re in this part of town, it’s worth seeing the Royal Castle, home to Poland’s rulers – and, briefly, Napoleon – until it was blown up in 1944. But the florid baroque interiors were preserved, and the new castle built around them. When I went, a string quartet was practising Haydn in one of the high-ceilinged rooms, summoning the spirit of the Enlightenment amid the gilded mirrors and portraits of indistinguishable aristocrats.
From there I ventured down the Royal Route, a seven-mile journey that takes in handsome churches, the Presidential Palace and the university. Many of the city’s museums are only a short detour away: on the banks of the Vistula, for instance, sit the Museum of Modern Art and the Copernicus Science Centre, where you can shoot the breeze with an AI-powered robot of the astronomer (though all hell broke loose, apparently, when someone asked it to recite Pi). Warsaw is, incidentally, great for walking, with a surprising abundance of parks. Keep an eye out for the red squirrels.
As I headed further south, the Soviet side of the city began to assert itself; creamy classicism segued into socialist realism. This would have been one gloomy place in, say, 1973. Now, it’s alive. At the intersection between Nowy Świat (New World Street) and Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue) – marked, improbably, by a statue of Charles de Gaulle and a giant steel palm tree – the old KGB headquarters has been converted into a warren of cafés and bars. The former censorship office across the road has been given new life as a boujee department store. What would Uncle Joe have made of that?
And then there’s the Night Market, based where the central railway station used to be. I arrived a few hours after visiting the Museum of Life Under Communism – radiantly kitsch and quietly depressing in equal measure – where the grisly, gristly food of those times is a prominent theme. The market, besides just being pretty cool, is a celebration of gastronomic choice, of openness to what the world has to offer. Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Georgian: you can have it all (except, possibly, Russian). The demand for this, my guide Kuba told me, comes from the young, who have disposable incomes and don’t share their parents’ and grandparents’ hang-ups about treating themselves. And Warsaw, with its still-affordable housing, buoyant job market and surreally efficient public transport, feels like a good place to be young right now.
But I had come for a taste of the old country too, so early one morning I made my way to Zachodnia station, on the shabbier fringe of the city, in search of a coach to Pultusk, about an hour’s drive away. It was more chaotic here, with reminders of a darker Europe just across the eastern border; Ukrainian passengers waited for buses to Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa.
My coach passed through Warsaw’s rather motley suburbs and into the countryside. This is a rich land of soft fields and lazy rivers, hemmed by beech and pine forests. It’s beautiful, and plenty of urbanites like to spend their weekends out here. There was a brief uproar when a spry walker, late to a stop, used his hiking poles to wrench the coach door open.
Soon enough we were in Pultusk, a well-preserved town with medieval roots and a long, pretty market square. Even on a Saturday, there wasn’t much doing. One of the first forms of life I encountered was a listless alpaca. Would you guess that, only 100 years ago, there was a bustling Ashkenazi community here – tailors, bakers, musicians, solemn religious men and (in my family’s case) eccentric dyers and hatters? You would not. The only real trace of this world, a world all but erased in the space of a decade, was a small memorial in a park, close to where the synagogue had been. I stood there for a while, wondering what exactly I’d been expecting. But then I wandered over to the river, on the outskirts of town, a serene spot where couples drank beer and kayakers drifted off into the late-afternoon haze. Here was something: this landscape, probably not much changed since my great-grandmother’s childhood, and a steady, silent witness to what happened afterwards.
Many people come to Poland for genealogical reasons. I encountered a fair few Americans and Israelis while I was there. They don’t always find what they’re looking for out in the towns and villages, but it’s a different story in Warsaw. The city wears its past on its sleeve, not least in its excellent museums. The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, built where the Warsaw Ghetto used to be, is a profoundly moving place – and a profoundly important one, given the evidence of lingering anti-Semitism in the country. The past is also there in the street names and public statues, from the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes (where, in 1970, the West German chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees) to the sculpture commemorating the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
Warsaw continues to reckon with this history, but it is no longer consumed by it. One balmy morning I took a boat down the Vistula, which splits the city in half. It’s a fun trip, and a good way to see how everything fits together. Wild swimmers – or paddlers, at least – dotted the banks. Birds bobbed and dived. I chatted to some other passengers, including a woman from Tel Aviv. She’d last visited decades ago, on a Who Do You Think You Are? kind of expedition. “Very different then,” she said with a faint grimace. Now there are so many other reasons to be here: she’d come with her daughter for Beyoncé’s concert at the National Stadium.
I looked back to the land and counted the cranes. This is the city that rose from the rubble – and it’s still on the way up.