For The Love of Travel

Four very different offerings from today’s wanderings:

Firstly, the Jewish cemetery, Okopowa St, one of the largest in the world. Established in 1806, it contains over 1/4 million marked graves and mass graves of victims of the Warsaw ghetto. Many of the crypts and graves are overgrown having been abandoned after the invasion and Holocaust. A dense forest has taken over. Incredible array of monuments to Jewish communists, orthodox rabbis and everyone in-between. It was reopened after the war and a small portion of it remains active, serving Warsaw’s small existing population. I found my grandfather’s tomb (Adam Slucki) after an hour’s scouring and my great-grandfather/grandmother in-laws tombs as well (parents of Adam’s wife, Frydereka). Adam was Chairman of the Institute of Engineers in Warsaw and had a thriving mechanical engineering business with his sons, Tadeusz and Jan. Tadeusz survived the ghetto and married my Mum in Bombay after WW2, when history brought them together in a new land. Adam’s wife, Frydereka and other son Jan, died in Treblinka.

Next, the Copernicus Science Centre: which contains over 450 interactive exhibits that enable visitors to single-handedly carry out experiments and discover the laws of science for themselves….and thousands of excited kids and possibly even more excited parents, were trying to, on the day I visited. Amazing decibel levels!!!  Luckily,  I’d bought a ticket to the planetarium to see  “Hello Earth”. I’d heard that the film was shown on spherical screens in the planetarium, in “fulldome immersive video technology” (allows the viewer to watch action taking place in front, over, on the sides and behind them). We first had a 15 minute introduction to the northern skies by an astronomer …and got to identify the Milky Way, the great Bear (Ursa Major), and pin-point Saturn in the sky. We then reclined in our seats and started our journey through landmark moments of the history of communication. We flew over and through the mythical Babel Tower, saw the first pictograms – paintings in Lascaux Caves, paid a visit to Johannes Gutenberg, visited a surrealistic library, witnessed the first ever phone call, saw the beginnings of the Internet and launch of the Voyager. It was also fantastic to vicariously hurtle through space surrounded by space junk and meteors.

Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Warszawie (BUW or Warsaw University Library) founded in 1816 on campus, has had its historical, theological, scientific papers, precious books and manuscripts taken away over the centuries, by various authorities, some returned; part of its collection damaged by fire in WW2. The current home for this library was opened in 1999. The distinct new building includes a large and beautiful botanical roof garden designed by landscape architect Arena Bajerska.  There are two garden areas, linked by a fountain of cascading water. The roof garden setting is 1 hectare and offers sweeping views of Warsaw, the Vistula river and the Świętokrzyski Bridge.  The library building has green walls and large wall tablets with mathematical formulas,  musical scores and famous quotations in various alphabets.  It is an excellent example of how a publicly accessible green space can be made at roof level.

Lastly, the quirky “Museum of Life under Communism” for an exhibition of souvenirs, furniture, equipment, photos, posters, and symbols of a bygone era. A model posing in front of the a Trabant vehicle. Manufactured in East Germany between 1957 – 1990, during the Communist occupation of Poland, ‘Trabbies’ were a common sight. Famous for losing exhaust pipes, heating breaking down and spark plugs blowing. Production was abandoned after the Berlin Wall came down. They were used as props on stage during U2’s “Achtung Baby” tour!

Photos of buildings built by Stalin’s Government in the Le Corbusier style of  design called “brutalism”. Corbusier believed the tower block was the solution for re-housing the masses displaced during WW2 and that high-rise buildings could be used to create spacious homes with the same amenity as a typical street. He created the buildings out of concrete – preventing the need for a steel frame, making it the most cost efficient solution. The less well off areas of Warsaw have lots of these concrete blocks in a bleak landscape, that are in decay and empty…serving as squats and drug lairs.

An embroidered piece of fabric saying “My father is building a different Poland”. The date is significant, 22 July – in 1944 a provisional government was officially proclaimed (in opposition to the Polish government in exile), to exercise control over Polish territory retaken from Germany and was fully sponsored and controlled by the Soviet Union.

The Łazienki (Bath) Park and Palace complex lies in Warsaw’s central district on an avenue that is part of the “Royal Route”, linking the Royal Castle with Wilanow Palace to the south.  Its Warsaw’s largest park, occupying over 76 hectares of the city centre. 

From 1674 the property belonged to Count Stanislaw Lubomirski, (note  coat of arms without a cross!) , who built a Baroque bathhouse and richly decorated it with stuccos, statues, and paintings; some of the original decorations and architectural details survive.

In 1766 King Stanislaw Poniatowski purchased the estate and converted the bathing pavilion into a classicist summer residence, with pavilions, an amphitheatre for concerts; villas and monuments. The Palace was the scene  of the famous “Thursday dinners”, to which the King would invite scholars, writers and poets – Lazienki at that time was an important and flourishing cultural centre.

The Solomon Room is my favourite part of the Palace, amazing murals. Unfortunately a series of paintings that used to here, by Marcello Bacciarelli depicting the history of Solomon – with King Stanislaw as the biblical king :), were torched by the Germans in 1944.

In the 19thC, following the partitions of Poland, it fell into the hands of the Russian tsars, who erected new pavilions in the gardens. In 1918, it was officially designated as a public park.

During WW2, the occupying Germans drenched its walls with petrol and set the comlex on fire. They also drilled holes in the palace walls in preparation for blowing it up. They never got around to carrying out the planned destruction. Following WW2, an arduous reconstruction project of the complex commenced which lasted 2 decades.