Chwała Saperom, Warszawa

Chwała Saperom is a Warsaw memorial by Stanisław Kulon, unveiled on the eighth of May nineteen seventy-five. Its circle of six tall pylons evokes a mine explosion, while relief panels recall mine clearance, bridge building, and the postwar work of military engineers. The memorial also includes riverside and underpass elements linked to Czerniaków.

Chwała Saperom is the memorial before you, in Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły Park beside Wisłostrada. Unveiled on the eighth of May nineteen seventy-five, it marked the approaching thirtieth anniversary of the war’s end, and Stanisław Kulon created it. Its main form turns the violence faced by military engineers into sculpture: six pylons, each seventeen metres high, make a circle suggesting a mine detonation, with a sapper defusing a mine among them.

Across those pylons, eighteen reliefs give the monument its working life. They show the hard tasks of clearing explosives and building bridges during the reconstruction of Warsaw and the country. Nearby plaques preserve the names and unit numbers of engineers who died.

The inscription honours those whose labour and blood began the rebuilding of a free Warsaw. This is a memorial spread across the riverside landscape. A panel in the pedestrian underpass beneath Wisłostrada portrays cooperation between insurgents and Polish Army soldiers at Czerniaków during September nineteen forty-four. By the entrance to Port Czerniakowski, a reinforced-concrete pillar rises from the riverbed, carrying figures of soldiers driving a pile; that section received restoration in twenty nineteen.