Things to do
8-
Fryderyk Chopin Museum
Chopin left Warsaw at twenty and never returned, though his heart did, carried home by his sister and sealed in a pillar of the Holy Cross church nearby. The museum in the Ostrogski palace holds manuscripts, letters, a death mask and the last piano he played. Entry is limited each hour. Musical benches around the city play his pieces at the press of a button.
-
Łazienki Park
The summer estate of the last Polish king, with a small neoclassical palace on an island in a lake, an amphitheatre on the water, peacocks on the lawns and red squirrels that take nuts from the hand. From mid-May to September pianists play Chopin beside his monument on Sundays, at noon and again at four, free, to an audience sitting on the grass.
-
Palace of Culture and Science
Stalin's unrequested gift to Poland, completed in 1955 in the wedding-cake style of the Moscow skyscrapers and, at 237 metres, long the tallest building in the country. Varsovians have debated demolishing it ever since. It holds theatres, a cinema and a congress hall. A lift runs to a terrace on the thirtieth floor, the one spot, the joke goes, without a view of it.
-
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Opened in 2013 on the site of the wartime ghetto, facing the memorial to its uprising. The core exhibition covers a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland, of which the Holocaust is one gallery among eight, and that proportion is the point. The centrepiece is a full reconstruction of the painted timber ceiling of a lost seventeenth century synagogue. Allow three hours.
-
Royal Castle
German engineers drilled the walls and blew the castle up in 1944. Staff had hidden furnishings, panelling and even door frames beforehand, and the building rose again between 1971 and 1984, paid for by public donation. The state rooms are reassembled around those rescued pieces. One gallery holds two Rembrandts; another hangs the Bellotto views used to rebuild the city.
-
Warsaw Old Town
In 1945 this was a field of rubble. Poles rebuilt it over the next two decades from prewar surveys, salvaged fragments and the detailed eighteenth century city views of Bernardo Bellotto, house by house down to the painted facades. UNESCO listed it as an outstanding act of reconstruction. The market square, the mermaid statue and the brick ramparts all date from that effort.
-
Warsaw Uprising Museum
On 1 August 1944 the underground army rose against the occupation and fought for sixty-three days while the Red Army waited across the river. This museum, in a former tram power station, tells it through sound, film, letters and a replica of the sewers used as supply routes. A short aerial film shows the emptied city in 1945. It is loud, crowded and affecting.
-
Wilanów Palace
The baroque country residence of Jan Sobieski, the king who broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, on the southern edge of the city. It is one of the few monuments here that came through the war standing, so the interiors are original. Painted ceilings glorify the king as a Roman hero. Formal gardens run down to a lake. Buses take half an hour from the centre.