Muranów

A memorial district. A rupture in a heart of Warsaw. A place where the Nazi during the WWII established borders of the Jewish ghetto quarter and after a deportation of nearly 300,000 Jews to the Nazi camps they leveled all the district.

There is an archive photo depicting ruins amongst which you can only see the Church of St Augustine (the church tower was a vantage point and German machine gun nest). No words could describe better Muranów and Nowolipki than this photo. Living in Muranów or sightseeing one cannot simply forget about this tragedy. However, the district lives on. All in all, it is a city centre, a wound had to heal.

We will show you places which apart from POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews are worth seeing in Muranów. It is of course not an administrative district, we treat it contractually. We are taking you for a one day trip in Muranów.

One more thing about the district’s name. In 1686 Józef Szymon Belotti, an Italian court architect of Polish kings, built here a palace, which he called Murano, commemorating a place of his origin. The palace was deconstructed in 1900. But if you are looking for the monuments from that period, which were rebuilt after the WWII, visit the KRASIŃSKI GARDEN and the KRASIŃSKI PALACE from the 17th century designed by one of the most renowned Warsaw architects Tylman Gamerski. The garden became available to the public in 1766 and has recently been revitalised. Today it is a part of the Polish National Library’s Special Collections Section.

An interesting fact is also the post-war socialist modernism in housing architecture designed by Bogdan Lachert. The architect, rebuilding the neighbourhood claimed that it should serve as a monument, constructed on the debris and from the debris. He left the irregular terrain and for construction of buildings he used crushed-brick. Lachert’s project was more minimalistic than the outcome. The authorities demanded from him more flamboyant socrealistic ornamental style.