Barbakan, Warsaw

Barbakan is Warsaw’s surviving semicircular fortified outpost, set between the Old and New Towns. Its curved brick mass was raised around fifteen forty-eight as the defensive approach to the Old Town’s New Town Gate. Jan Baptysta Wenecjanin created the design in Renaissance architecture, a manner inspired by the revived forms of classical antiquity.

Notice the rhythm of openings cut through the masonry: the lower level held artillery gunports, while an enclosed covered passage ran above. The building’s military logic became outdated almost as soon as it was finished, because artillery developed with startling speed. Yet it did see fighting: on the thirtieth of June sixteen fifty-six, troops of King John the Second Casimir retook it from Swedish forces during the Swedish Deluge.

Much later, its weakened remains were dismantled and absorbed into apartment houses. War then devastated this part of Warsaw. The Barbakan you see was rebuilt after the conflict, from seventeenth-century images and salvaged bricks brought from demolished historic houses in Nysa and Wrocław. It preserves the memory of the walls that once enclosed the city, while opening a passage between its oldest neighbourhoods.