The country's capital and largest city. Despite a history reaching back to the Middle Ages, it is also one of Poland's most modern cities, for when the Russians liberated it in January 1945, less than one in ten of the buildings was fit for use, and 800 000 of its inhabitants - nearly two in three of the city's prewar population - were dead or deported.
In a massive rebuilding project the snugly walled, medieval and Renaissance Stare Miasto (Old Town) was painstakingly re-created. Its narrow streets are now for pedestrians only, and teem with cafes and bars, echoing the lively commercial and crafts centre that existed before 1596, when it was made the national capital in place of Cracow. Along the route towards Cracow spread the 17th and 18th-century expressions of Warsaw's new status: the Royal Palace (reopened in the 1980s); town palaces of the nobles, including the Radziwill and Potocki families; centres of art and learning, which now form the city's university; churches and convents; recreational areas, including Lazienki Park; and - 10 km (6 miles) from the centre -Wilanow, the royal summer residence, which was built for the Polish king Jan Sobieski in the 1680s. The opening of the Vienna-Warsaw railway in 1845 unleashed industrial development: to the west of Muranow, where Jewish immigrants settled, and to the east acr
oss the Vistula river in Praga.
By 1939 there were 1 290 000 Warsovians, 35 per cent of them Jewish, and nearly 30 per cent Yiddish-speaking. In 1940, the occupying Germans confined 450 000 Jews to a walled ghetto - on rations providing only 184 calories a day - to await transfer to death camps. Survivors were removed and the ghetto razed following an abortive Jewish rising in 1943. The following summer, the Germans began a systematic destruction of the rest of the city after a rising led by the Polish Resistance failed while the Russian Red Army was poised just outside the city.
Rebuilding has created a spacious new city outside the Old Town. Arterial roads and a motorway have replaced the former maze of streets. The highways stretch out to modern high-rise suburbs, with plants producing steel, cars, cement, tractors and electronic goods.
Among Warsaw's many powerfully evocative monuments are the 'Warsaw Nike' (opposite the Grand Theatre), which commemorates the city's war dead, and the simple memorial to the heroes of the ghetto at Muranow.
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