Posted on 11.04.2012 and completed on 14.05.2013
The legend attributes the Warsaw name to a fisherman Wars and his wife Sawa, a mermaid who lived in the Vistula River and who Wars fell in love with. Nice legend, but actually Warsz was a 12th/13th century nobleman who owned a village located at the site of today's Mariensztat neighbourhood. Unlike other old cities of Poland, such Krakow or Poznan, Warsaw is a relatively young city, which really became important in 1596, when King Sigismund III Vasa moved the court from Kraków to Warsaw. So the capital of Mazovia became the capital of the Polish Crown, and of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, primarly due to its central location between the Commonwealth's capitals of Kraków and Vilnius. This location was the city's luck, but, given the troubled history of Poland, it has also brought it a lot of misfortune, being pillaged and burned several times.
The largest catastrophe suffered by the city was also the latest, during the WWII. Germans planned destruction of the Polish capital before the start of war, what they did after the Warsaw Uprising (1 August – 2 October 1944), under express orders of Hitler. Monuments and government buildings were blown up by Verbrennungs und Vernichtungskommando (Burning and Destruction Detachments), so that about 85% of the city had been destroyed, including the historic Old Town and the Royal Castle. By January 1945, about 85% of the buildings had been destroyed: 10% as a result of the September 1939 campaign and other combat, 15% during the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943), 25% during the Warsaw Uprising, and 35% due to systematic German actions after the Uprising.
In terms of population, the situation was even more terrible. In the Uprising, ca. 170,000 people died, from among which only 16,000 were insurgents, and after that all the civilians (ca. 650,000) were deported to the transit camp in Pruszków (Durchgangslager Pruszków). In general, during the German occupation (1939–1945) ca. 700,000 people died in Warsaw, i.e. more than all Americans and British. Thus, if the city had reached 1,300,000 inhabitants in 1939, at the end of 1945 had only 422,000 inhabitants.
After WWII, the Warsaw's Old Town (Stare Miasto), bounded by Wybrzeże Gdańskie, along the bank of the Vistula, and by Grodzka, Mostowa and Podwale Streets, was meticulously rebuilt. As many of the original bricks were reused as possible. The rubble was sifted for reusable decorative elements, which were reinserted into their original places. Bernardo Bellotto's 18th-century vedute, as well as pre-WWII architecture students' drawings, were used as essential sources in the reconstruction effort. The heart of the area is the Old Town Market Place (Rynek Starego Miasta), which dates back to the end of the 13th century. The houses around it represented the Gothic style until the great fire of 1607, after which they were rebuilt in late-Renaissance style and eventually in late-Baroque style by Tylman Gamerski in 1701.
Besides the market itself, with its restaurants, cafés and shops, in the first postcard also appear (at the bottom, from left to right):
● Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and of St. Joseph, commonly known as the Carmelite Church (Kościół Karmelitów) - a Roman Catholic church built in 1692-1701 to the plan of Józef Szymon Bellotti, best known for its Neoclassical-style façade, erected by Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł, who commissioned the Hungarian architect Efraim Szreger. It was one of the few buildings only slightly damaged during the WWII.
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