Gnojna Góra, Warszawa

Gnojna Góra is a viewing terrace on Warsaw’s Old Town escarpment, formed over a former municipal dump. Its buried waste reaches roughly twenty-three metres. The site also holds Siłacz, a sculpture of a nude man lifting a boulder, created by Stanisław Czarnowski.

Gnojna Góra is the grassy viewing terrace on Warsaw’s Old Town escarpment, created over a former municipal dump. Until eighteen forty-four, this slope received the city’s rubbish and human waste. The buried layer of discarded material reaches about twenty-three metres in depth.

Closing it proved difficult: residents repeatedly returned because it was such a convenient place to dispose of refuse. The stench drifted as far as the nearby Royal Castle, while rats multiplied here and nearby water faced contamination. An especially grim treatment for syphilis involved burying sufferers to the neck in the dump, in the belief that this could heal them.

After the dump closed, earth covered the slope. Archaeological work carried out here during the nineteen sixties revealed much about everyday life in historic Warsaw. The terrace and its stairway down to Bugaj opened in nineteen sixty-eight. Notice Siłacz at the southern part of the terrace: Stanisław Czarnowski made this sculpture in nineteen oh eight, showing a nude man hoisting a boulder; it was placed here in nineteen seventy-two.