Plac Powstańców Warszawy, Warszawa

Plac Powstańców Warszawy is a Śródmieście square whose changing names trace Warsaw’s past. Its landmark Hotel Warszawa tower was Poland’s earliest skyscraper and endured the Warsaw Uprising. The square also preserves the memory of insurgent fighting and wartime destruction.

Plac Powstańców Warszawy is the square around you in Warsaw’s Śródmieście district. Its name has honoured the Warsaw insurgents since nineteen fifty-seven. Before that, this patch of city carried names linked with the Infant Jesus hospital, Warka, Napoleon, and, during occupation, Postplatz.

Notice the paving and open space: this was once a garden tract, laid out as a rectangular square during the eighteen twenties. The tall Hotel Warszawa building began life as Prudential’s headquarters, erected from nineteen thirty-one to nineteen thirty-three. At sixty-six metres, it was Poland’s earliest skyscraper.

Here the uprising’s fighting began around four in the afternoon, before the appointed outbreak hour. Insurgents held the Prudential building throughout the battle and fired from its windows at the Main Post Office. A massive Karl-Gerät shell struck the tower during August; decades later, metro works beneath Świętokrzyska uncovered another shell of that same kind. The tower alone returned in its prewar form after the war, making it a stubborn survivor amid a square repeatedly remade by Warsaw’s history.