Park Praski, Warszawa

Park Praski is the historic municipal park spread through Praga-Północ on the Vistula’s eastern side. It began as Praga’s earliest public park, after Tsar Alexander the Second authorized its creation in eighteen sixty-five. Jan Dobrowolski planned the grounds, developing them across land that had been wet and had once formed a former river channel.

The park welcomed the public in eighteen seventy-one, and its long avenue was conceived as the spine of the whole layout. Its names carry Warsaw’s changing history. The park originally honored the tsar, became Park Praski during the Great War, and since nineteen ninety-eight has borne the name of soldiers of the Polish First Army.

The zoo beside the park was once part of these grounds, then separated for its own use during the interwar years. A bear enclosure opened here after the war and remains in use. You can also seek out the memorial to writer Eliza Orzeszkowa, installed in the late nineteen thirties and made by Henryk Kuna, as well as the giraffe sculpture added decades later. The park and zoo entered the heritage register together, recognizing this as a preserved fragment of Praga’s public landscape.