Rynek Mariensztacki, Warsaw

Rynek Mariensztacki is a Warsaw square that serves as the gathering place for the compact Mariensztat housing quarter. Let the fountain draw your attention: Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz made the small figures of boys who watch its sprays of water. This quiet-looking space began when the municipal authorities assembled properties here after eighteen forty-three to create a modest market.

By about eighteen sixty-five, it had become Powiśle’s principal marketplace, with timber booths selling chiefly food. Apartment houses arrived around the square early in the twentieth century, but the setting visible now belongs to a postwar remaking. In nineteen forty-nine, Mariensztat was rebuilt around this square, which received its present name at that time.

Buildings dressed to resemble older townhouses, with tiled roofs, enclose it on three sides; the remaining edge opens onto the East–West Route. The square also became a stage for public festivities during the nineteen fifties. In July nineteen fifty, a mass meeting here denounced the war in Korea. That mixture of ordinary shopping, reconstruction, sculpture, and political theatre gives this small square an unusually concentrated Warsaw story.