99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-72- New Old Town

Episode Date: February 6, 2013

Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part: The Old Town. Walking through this historic district, it’s just like any other quaint European city. There are tourist … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you know anything about Central European cities, when you hear Warsaw, you think, grey, ugly, communist. But there is a part of Warsaw that is anything but those things, the old town. Walking through these strict districts, it's just like any other Quaint European city. Tour shops, horse carriage rides, church buyers. The buildings are beautiful. But actually, it's all fake.

It's just a replica of what once was. Like so many European cities during the Second World War, Warsaw was destroyed. It had to be rebuilt. Now when you walk around the reconstructed historic part of Warsaw, you'll find these big, last-mounted plaques on display on the sidewalk. In-memorold paintings of these historic buildings in front of you. The first time I noticed one of these displays on the Vyshwiat Street, and I was completely

drawn in. I studied the painting, and then I studied the building above. And just like I was set up too, I thought, wow, they did an amazing job rebuilding it. But then later our reporter Amy Drostovska found out, it's not quite like that. You were entering something which is effectively a stage set intended to recreate

an atmosphere of a certain period, but you're unaware of that. That's me Haumodovsky, who was born in Warsaw, now he's a social anthropologist at Cambridge University. He told me about the incredible process of putting the city back together again. It's a challenge a lot of European cities were facing after the war. Warsaw's massive rebuilding of its entire medieval old town was lauded as one of the most impressive rebuilding post-war projects on the continent.

They made it look to everyone, like they reclaimed what was lost. But here's the thing, Warsaw's historic old town is not a replica of the real thing. It's a reimagining, an historic city that never really was. So let's back up for some history. Sure, Warsaw is damaged during the war as were other cities. But really Warsaw, occupied by Nazi forces, got hit particularly hard. One of the worst cases in the whole war. Practically the whole city was destroyed.

People quibble about the exact statistics, but most agree it was something like over 80% of the core part of Warsaw. Really most of the city, especially the parts of Poles considered important. Tupada's for surviving Poles were an 11-hour attempt to take back their capital. Hitler gave an order. Pacify Warsaw. Raise it to the ground. A new of those stuff are buildings. Fight the Syroges and civilians, doctors and workers, pros and jewels, women and children.

They fight for a day. Two days. A week. Two. Three. Four. Five. Two, three, four, five. The destruction was focused on the most important buildings, on the most significant historical buildings, because they were identified with the past and with sort of national identity,

and that was exactly what was identified as the most important to get rid of by the Nazis. And as Warsaw burned, the Soviets, ready to take over after the retreating German forces, stood on the other side of the river and watched. Stalin's forces did nothing to help the Poles and the Warsaw uprising or save their city. It's not that he wanted the insurrection to fail because destroyed Warsaw would be that much easier to take over once the Germans were defeated. After the war, Warsaw was in ruins. It was liberated in January 1945, and this is when the inhabitants started coming back

to Warsaw, and there's all these descriptions of people sort of, you know, absolutely shocked bags and hands just wandering around, dazed, unable to find their old homes, and unable to recognize anything. This was Warsaw. Maybe again, after a year, the true meaning of that battle will be assessed by soldiers and historians. Maybe a bigger and more beautiful city will be built on the ruins, to be the capital of a new and better Poland. But this one died a soldier's death for the common cause. And to die in the capital to another city. But instead, Pulse decided to start over from scratch.

Much of the city was rebuilt according to communist plans, fast, cheap, and big. Apartment blocks, wide avenues, heavy-gray buildings, communist ideology, and architectural form. But when it came to the historic district of Warsaw, the old town and a long connecting section called the Royal Root, they decided to restore not just rebuild. And with the way planners were going about it, the historians, archaeologists, all the specialists involved. It really seemed like they were going to bring old Warsaw back to life. There was this incredible focus on authenticity in rebuilding the Old Town, so there was really an emphasis for the Old Town to be built from the same physical matter as the Old Town was. So, the special kilns were built on the outskirts of Warsaw, where the rubble from the Old Town was taken and made into bricks from which the Old Town was to

be rebuilt. And the bricks that were reusable, that were just sort of lying around in the rubble, they were collected and they were cleaned and they were sort of polished up and they were used in building these new old buildings. It took several years, but they did it. And when the new old town was first opened, people were happy, ecstatic to have it back. Even in the west it was seen as a major accomplishment, a kind of victory after all the destruction of the war, a triumph of the human spirit. The pictures from the time show a sort of carnival as it was unveiled. You can see it from old photographs, people are joyfully wandering around this miraculously recreated place,

which they thought had disappeared forever. This is something that made millions of people very happy, and that thousands of people, of ordinary people participated in. It was really a very successful social of social sort of dirty exercise. So the old city was brought back to life. After a bit of time though, people started to notice something kind of strange. It seemed like Old Warsaw was a little bit off. There are these descriptions that David Crowley, who's an art historian, wrote a book on

Warsaw, talks about of people who knew the old town before the war, wandering around and instead of feeling this kind of uncanny disjuncture between the city that they remembered and the city that they're wandering around now. So it was almost the same, it felt incredibly corresponded very closely to what they knew before, but then something wasn't quite right. Remember what I said earlier about Orsau's old town not being a recreation, but instead a reimagining? It turns out that despite all that effort to use the exact same bricks from the rubble, that show of authenticity was just that, a show. Like Morovsky said before, a sort of stage set.

And this is highlighted even more so by the fact that, you know, the facades, the cobbles, everything seems absolutely fine, and then you wander through a doorway, and you wander into effectively a sort of modern staircase, and into a modern flat, with this kind of historical exterior. So there was this sort of very uncanny sense. It's not just that the builders concentrated on the exterior of the buildings and didn't bother creating what was behind them.

Warsaw's new historic district was incredibly odd by design because actually it was different. It was never supposed to be exactly the same as it was. So there's this weird disjunction between this incredible emphasis on authenticity, old bricks being reused and special kills being built for this purpose, this big focus on continuity, physical continuity. But at the same time there was a very clearly stated idea that the old town shouldn't be the same old, there was a very clearly stated idea that the Old Town shouldn't

be the same Old Town as before 1939. It should be better than it was, so it should be a more perfect Old Town than existed before the war. Before the war, ironically, Warsaw's historic Old Town was slowly fading away on its own. Before the war was basically, it was a slum. It was more or less a sl Islam. It didn't have proper sewage facilities, it didn't have proper draining. It was basically lived in by very poor inhabitants

with a few kind of churches and obviously the cathedral was in it and the royal castle. But beyond the castle square, the old town square was the location for a sort of haphazard market and wasn't considered to be a particular sort of prestigious part of the city. It had been sort of ruinedphazard market and wasn't considered to be a particularly sort of prestigious part of the city, it had been sort of ruined over time. But after the war, reeling from loss piled upon loss, historic Warsaw took on a new meaning. Now that it was missing completely, it had more power and Polish people's memory than if it was around, no matter what the form. So to the communist way of thinking, the old town needed to be rebuilt so that it

could be forgotten. The cynical argument is that the old town was rebuilt as a sort of ideological camouflage. So in order to mask the fact that Poland was being taken over by a sort of alien power, this alien power decided to rebuild the whole town to make it seem like they had some sort of respect for Polish culture and Polish history, whereas in reality they were sort of undermining everything, undermining the old, the social structure, everything that came before them. It's like this, if Warsaw's historic capital just got leveled over and replaced by gray, ugly apartment blocks, people

would long for what they were missing. They'd remember their significant city, the seat of the nation's past. And not only long for it, they'd make a martyr of it. Their cherished past killed by communism, by the Soviets, the same Soviets, by the way, who stood on the other side of the river and watched Warsaw burn. And the communist would never win over the polls.

So by bringing the old city back, the communists made it and hopefully their partners' destruction, forgettable. The past could stop being such a distraction and they could go about their business of overhaul in the country. So that's why they decided to rebuild the old town. But the communists did it in such a way

to keep their core ideals intact and this is where it gets really weird. When city planners were looking for inspiration on how to better rebuild Old Warsaw, they went back further than just before the war when the Old Town was far from its heyday. So rather than the 1930s, they looked to the 1830s. Take one of the most famous streets in the Old part of town, Novosviyat, New World Street. For decades before the war, Novosviyat Street was one of the liveliest places in Warsaw, full of shops, cafes, and hotels. Over time, the once uniform buildings there started

to take on different heights, as different owners would build on extra levels to expand and improve. And then when it was rebuilt, it was decided that this sort of bustling capitalist in a galletarian atmosphere of Novishviat was improper, and so it was rebuilt effectively in the image of how it would have looked in the early 19th century. In this sort of classicist, osfaliosteer, simple style, and nearly all the buildings were reduced to a height of three stories. And so this is sort of also, this is an attempt to make it into a egalitarian kind of enlightenment street, rather than a sort of nasty, capitalist sort of cutthroat laissez-faire street that

had been in the 19th century. And here's where it gets even weirder still. For other parts of Old Warsaw, the post-war city planners went back further still to the 1700s, to a city that never really existed. A city imagined by an Italian painter. Remember the sidewalk displays I mentioned earlier, the ones that show pictures of Warsaw before the war?

It turns out that the paintings are by an Italian named Bernardo Balota. He was what's called a vedutista, meaning he specialized in the Venetian art of realistically painting cityscapes and precisely documenting their details. He was invited to Warsaw in the late 1700s by the King of Poland to become court painter and make pictures of the capital.

To help his work, Balotto used a camera obscura, a predecessor of the photographic camera, and he had an incredible eye for detail. So the 20 plus paintings he created were a pretty remarkable document of what Warsaw looked like then. Except for one thing. Balotto had a tendency to make a few improvements. On one level, the paintings were incredibly precise, but on another level, Balotto was

very prone to making stuff up. So he didn't sort of steer away from indulging his artistic license. So you have, in several examples, he purified the buildings he was painting. Like adding a story to a building here, adding some decoration there, maybe changing the number of windows in a building, all sorts of little things that made the paintings

more pleasing to him. The King of Poland loved it. And so it turned out later, did the Communist. They liked Palotto's paintings because they showed a full range of society, not just the elite. They also liked his paintings because they were of the city before the heyday of capitalism, when Warsaw, as they saw it, was still pure. In fact, there was plenty of other documentation of Warsaw's historic section. A group of architects and students did painstaking work during the war before the destruction, creating blueprints, taking photographs. And a lot of those blueprints were used in the Warsaw reconstruction.

But when it came to rebuilding the old town, below Toe's paintings became the primary source. And now you can see the evidence. There's a building called John's House, which is a sort of 18th-century townhouse. You basically sort of added these kinds of freezes and carvings to the facade. I think the number of floors was changed as well. Some of the roof detailing was changed. If you look at a photo, if you compare a photograph of this building from 1939 and then a photograph of how it looks today and the painting,

you can see that basically the stuff that Bilotto added to the building exists now in reality. So his sort of flights of fancy were materialized in the way that the building looked after the war. So these historic Warsaw buildings like Johns house, they never existed, at least not like they do now. And the city continues to recreate itself in the form of these paintings. Recently they finished a huge remodeling of the royal route, widening the sidewalks, renovating a church facade. So it looks exactly like it does in Bologtoes paintings, but never like they actually looked

before. It's like making an imaginary city come to life. In the end, Warsaw has its old town back. The groups of children on school field trips treat due to flu. Tourists conspicuously absent from the rest of the city, flock there. And Varsovian themselves, largely avoided. It's a place where you're kind of begrudgingly obligated to bring out of town visitors. You're a fisherman's wharf, you're navy pier. I'm sure you know and hate the one in your town.

Maybe you'll walk through there on a Sunday or holiday with your family. But you don't think if it is the real Warsaw. It feels more like Disney's abcott center. There's a certain young hipster contingent in war saw that revels instead in the ugliest parts of the city, the failed communist experiment. They scoff at the old town because it's so fake, such tourist trash. But Muroski says they're wrong.

It's the old town that really represents what the city and the nation itself has been through. It's equal parts truth and falsehood, ideology and art, it's trauma and the entire recovery that comes after. 99% Invisible was written and produced this week by Amy Drostofska and Dave McGuire, with help from Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. It's a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook.

I tweet at Roman Mars, but we have links to all the stuff we've been talking about and pictures of Italian paintings brought to life in Warsaw at 99%invisible.org. you