Warsaw: Reconstructed glory

Once Mary and I decided on Europe over South America, I agonised over the languages I'd have to get acquainted with to smoothen the journey. Usually this amounted to little more than hi, bye, thank you, where is, do you speak English please. Of course, I'll still be struggling to pick out words when we speak with people. At the very least we (I) could read signs, transport schedules, buy tickets and not get (too) lost.

Needless to say, Europe is unlike South America, where knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese would suffice to get by - mostly. It was not so hard to pick up smatterings of the Slavic languages (Polish, Slovak, Czech, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croat, Bosnian, Macedonian and Slovenian), having grappled with bits of Russian and Ukrainian on our honeymoon. But there were other newer, stranger languages to cramp into my limited intellect - amongst them Greek, Albanian, the Baltic (Latvian and Lithuanian) and Finno-Ugric (Estonian and Hungarian) languages. Going from Vilnius to Warsaw took us from the unfamiliar Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian tongues to the more familiar Polish one.

It was an overnight journey. In between sleep, we caught glimpses of the rolling Suwalki countryside between southwestern Lithuania and northeastern Poland laved in deep silver-blue moonlight. But nightshade was cast thickly over the horizons each time we passed under street lighting. It's ironic. With lamps we emulate moonlight, and seek to banish darkness. Yet the reach of our lamps is short, and night gathers in redoubled force beyond the furthest penumbra.

These thoughts accompanied our start to a fifteen-day sojourn in a country which emerged not very long ago from nearly two centuries of a benighted history.

Below: "Saruman! Saruman, come forth!" Wait, that's the Palace of Culture and Science, eerily lit in the Varsovian night.

The country that disappeared

Growing up, I struggled to reconcile what I knew about Poland to obstinate childhood convictions. Was Poland not a misspelt male Frankish name masquerading as a country? And Dad said before too that it has disappeared from the map before.

Wait, countries actually disappear?

They do, though it would be many years before I understood that by disappearing it was meant that Poland suffered partitions by its neighbours. The most (in)famous ones took place in three stages between 1772 and 1795, during which the Russia, Prussia and Austria carved up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (introduced while we were in Vilnius - a discussion of why the Commonwealth was unable to resist its neighbours would take up too much time, and would be left for another time perhaps). Then, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to its north, it enjoyed two decades of independence between the two world wars, before being taken apart by the Nazis and the Soviets in 1939. The Soviets didn't leave until 1991.

Below: A familiar face - the city's monument to Adam Mickiewicz (last seen standing in deep thought outside St Anne's Church in Vilnius). This was put up in 1898, the centenary of the poet's birth, though at a time when Warsaw was a provincial city in the Tsarist Empire and Russification policies were being intensified.

Poland has always been a hotly contested piece of real estate, lying right on the east-west passage across the Great European Plain. The land is no stranger to war and ruin. From eastwards came the Mongol hordes and countless Russian armies, from westwards the Franks and their latter-day kin. The most recent war, the Second World War, wrought apocalyptic ruin on Polish soil. As Mary reminds me (smugly quoting from a travel documentary), more than 90% of Warsaw was levelled by 1945.

Below: The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, just east of the Saxon Gardens, a tale of tears and of blood shed for the Polish cause.

Blue skies over Warsaw

The Warsaw we visited had been rebuilt from the ashes of 1945. Walking in the Old Town and admiring the handsome facades on Plac Zamkovy, it is hard to shed the consciousness of all these once being rubble. But I'm being a purist here, and a hypocrite - there are few attractions in Europe that haven't been patched up. It wasn't all reminiscence and faithful reproduction. A few additional flourishes to the Warsaw cityscape were also made courtesy of the Soviets. The most notable Soviet monument in the city is the Palace of Culture and Science, a monolith of Socialist Realism that even today remains Poland's tallest building.

Above (top to bottom): The reconstructed Old Town, starting with Plac Zamkovy which is dominated by the Royal Castle. Interestingly, the Castle is younger than I am, being rebuilt only in 1988; St Martin's Church seen from an alley; Standing beneath the Barbican, a fortified gate north of the Old Town.

Above (top to bottom): Polish culture - language, arts, faith (in this case Roman Catholicism) - kept alive a nation's identity when Poles either did not have a Poland or could not call Poland their own. And Poles are heirs to a rich cultural history, represented by the pictures here - the Baroque edifice of St Casimir's Church; the intensely nationalistic decorations put up inside St John's Church in the Old Town; the interior of the Church of the Holy Cross, where the composer Frederick Chopin's heart is interred (in the first pillar on the left, and yes he was Polish); in the same church, a chapel dedicated to Pope John Paul II, who became a symbol of Polish resistance to Soviet domination...

Below (continued): ...Copernicus, famous for putting forward the theory that planets revolved around the sun, throned before the Polish Academy of Sciences; the (rebuilt) National Theatre, another cherished haven of Polishness.

Below: Postwar Warsaw wasn't simply rebuilt to look like prewar Warsaw. The Palace of Culture and Science was constructed using Soviet funds and labour, and of course entirely under Soviet orders. The Soviets milked every opportunity presented by its construction to generate pro-Soviet propaganda: the frequent publicity given to how the frenzied construction (by workers labouring through consecutive shifts) always proceeded ahead of schedule, its presentation as an apparent gift from the Soviet people to the Polish people and that as a symbol of Soviet progress it towers over everything else in Warsaw. It still does.

Blue skies were the norm while we were in Warsaw. The mercury plummeted too, and for the first time on this trip we suited up with all we've got. This did not stop Varsovians from getting out in force. Despite it being four days after Christmas, Warsaw looked to still be in the thick of festivities. We really like the Christmas lights put up in the city. They weren't very elaborate - several installation pieces here and there, and fairy lights on trees - but were tastefully selected.

An additional day in Warsaw would have been ideal to see the sights beyond the vicinity of the Old Town. But in our planning we couldn't pull away from the thought that there wasn't very much to see because it was once all destroyed anyway.

Below: Checking out the Christmas decor in Warsaw, which invites wonder - wives wondering if their gifts will ever match those glittering parcels on Warsaw's streets, and poor Thomas the train wondering what he did wrong to deserve his eye-catching cabaret get-up.

There were a number of lessons from our chilly day and a half in Warsaw. While we commend the spirit of the Polish people in rebuilding, we should not forget how many times their cities, and their state with it, have been razed to the ground.

So, countries do disappear, and international boundaries as we know today cannot be taken to be fixed in perpetuity. If big ones like what Poland once was cannot escape such a fate, what are the odds of thinking a small country like ours can be held to prosper forever? I suppose it is our duty to try, nonetheless. Stranger things have happened in this world. And they were not brought about by people sitting, standing by and watching.