Kamień Milowy, Warsaw

Kamień Milowy is Warsaw’s national zero-kilometre marker: this granite pillar beside Dmowski Roundabout supplies the starting reference for distances shown on Polish road signs. It occupies the meeting point of Aleje Jerozolimskie and Marszałkowska Street, beside Parade Square. The polished stone shaft is two and a half metres tall, set on a square base measuring one and a half metres across.

Its carved faces name journeys outward from Warsaw, giving distances to European capitals and to Poland’s voivodeship cities as they existed during the nineteen fifties. The compact block turns an abstract point on a map into an object you can walk around. The marker arrived while Parade Square was being formed, sometime from nineteen fifty-two to nineteen fifty-five.

When the roundabout was rebuilt, it was moved a short distance closer in April nineteen seventy-one. Its makers gave it the character of an older Polish roadside sign, so amid the broad modern traffic junction it feels like a small surviving instrument from a road atlas.