When Poland’s capital moved from Kraków to Warsaw in 1596 the square beside the castle became the cornerstone of the largest Empire in Renaissance Europe. Source: PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek / shutterstock Castle Square There’s also a collection of paintings from the 16th to the 18th century by masters like Rembrandt, van Dyck, Joos van Cleve and Gainsborough.īook online: Tour of the Royal Castle in Warsaw Since the last reconstruction in the 1980s the castle has been a museum, where you can view the apartments of the 16th-century King Sigismund II Augustus, and visit the House of Parliament, the fountain-head of Polish democracy and where amendments made to the Polish-Lithuanian constitution ushered in unprecedented religious tolerance. The castle has come through an eventful 700 years involving two demolitions, one by the Swedes in the mid-17th century and another by the Germans in the Second World War. Source: RossHelen / shutterstock Warsaw Royal CastleĪt the southern entrance to the Old Town you’ll be met by the 90-metre facade of the Mannerist and Baroque castle, the seat of the Polish monarchs for hundreds of years.
Suggested tour: Warsaw Polin Museum Guided Tour 6.
Later comes the Holocaust, and in the gloom are stories about the heroic efforts of the Oyneg Shabbos group to archive the truth about the Warsaw ghetto. You can see a prayer book from 1272 with an early sentence written in Yiddish and find out about the golden age of religious tolerance in the 16th and 17th centuries. In eight galleries, the core exhibition uses a mixture of genuine artefacts, reconstructions and interactive displays to explain how Poland became home for Europe’s largest Jewish community. POLIN is at the northern part of the former Warsaw ghetto in Muranów, and was designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki. Seven years in the making, this museum fully opened in 2014 and documents the millennium-long history of the Jews in Poland. Source: Juliusz Klosowski / shutterstock POLIN Museum Of The History Of Polish Jews POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews After almost nine tenths of the city was wiped out, the Old Town’s rebirth was an incredible feat that has earned it Old Town UNESCO World Heritage Status.Īs you pick your way along alleys and passageways, past guildhalls, churches and burgher houses you’d never imagine that this was all just a pile of debris 70 years ago.Ī couple of sights that we haven’t included on the list below are Canon Square, a triangular plaza enclosed by tenements that once houses canons of the Warsaw Chapter, and St John’s Archcathedral, holding the tomb of Stanisław II Augustus, the last King of Poland.Īvailable tour: Warsaw Old Town 1.5-Hour Segway Tourĥ. When you tour a historic city centre you’re normally out for genuine, untouched architecture and monuments.īut after Warsaw’s experiences in the 20th century, the magic of this quarter is in the detailed and faithful reconstruction carried out up to 1962. Source: fotorince / shutterstock Old Town, Warsaw Let’s explore the best things to do in Warsaw: 1. To see it, take the Royal Route, which threads through royal properties like Łazienki Park, a little world of palaces and pavilions in the middle of the city. But there are also memories of the splendour of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the Early Modern Age, when Warsaw was the capital of Europe’s largest empire. The human impact is harder to mend, and Warsaw has museums and monuments that give unflinching accounts of one of the darkest periods in European History. Suggested tour to start out your trip: Warsaw Ultimate Day Tour