Plac Sokratesa Starynkiewicza, Warsaw

Plac Sokratesa Starynkiewicza is a triangular square in Ochota’s Filtry quarter, shaped by Koszykowa, Lindleya, and Aleje Jerozolimskie. It bears the name of Sokrates Starynkiewicz, who led Warsaw as mayor from eighteen seventy-five until eighteen ninety-two. Much of this space is also Alfons Grotowski Square, a planted garden created in nineteen thirty-six to mark the filters’ half-century.

Notice the linden canopy and the quieter character it gives this busy urban junction. The square itself was laid out in eighteen ninety-three, beside the Lindley Filters, Warsaw’s great water and sewerage works. That connection runs through almost every layer of the place: the imposing Waterworks and Sewage Directorate headquarters rose here between nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen thirty, though a construction failure forced a change from its original design to a modernist finish.

At the Lindleya and Nowy Gród corner, a sandstone obelisk carries an even older memory. Made in seventeen ninety-nine, it was moved here from the former Child Jesus Hospital cemetery and commemorates more than thirty thousand patients buried there. Another inscribed boulder at Lindleya and Koszykowa remembers Yugoslav workers who helped rebuild Warsaw after the war.