“Trying to impose Communism on Poland is like trying to fit a saddle to a cow.” (Joseph Stalin)
[Continuing the account of the trip to Poland I made with my wife in October 2022.]
Day 6 – Saturday 15th October 2022 – Wrocław to Poznań
After breakfast we strolled the short distance to Wrocław Główny station to catch the 0955 train to Poznań. Again we were travelling first class in a compartment carriage. The journey took less than two hours and the train arrived a little early at about 1140. The hotel we were staying in was a short distance from the station and we took the opportunity to call there and leave our bags.
Freed of our bags we walked to the city centre. Most of the historic centre of Poznań was being dug up at the time that we were there to replace the water pipes and sewers. Initially we walked right through the main square and carried on to the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul on the cathedral island to the north of the city centre. This site is where the first Polish state was founded and the place of baptism of the the first Polish king, Mieszko I, in the 10th Century. Upon arriving at the the Basilica we noticed a steady stream of smartly dressed people arriving there and we correctly deduced that there was a wedding about to start. We managed only a brief look inside the cathedral before the service commenced.
On returning to the old town centre, we visited a museum devoted to the Poznań Uprising of 1918, located in the main square. After the end of World War I, this Greater Poland Uprising successfully wrested control of Poznań and surrounding areas from Germany and led to their incorporation into the newly recreated Poland. The timing of the uprising was key, as it allowed the changes in control to be ratified by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The museum was quite small but clearly explained this episode of Polish history.
When we had finished in the museum it was approaching 3pm, so we headed to the other side of the square to view the town hall clock. At noon and 3pm each day, when the clock strikes, mechanical goats appear high up on the clock tower. This event drew a large crowd, squeezing in wherever they could, as much of the square was fenced-off for the ongoing construction works.
From the town square we walked past the former royal castle, which is now a museum of applied arts.
Our final visit of the day was to the Enigma Cypher Centre which is a superb exhibition on the history of code-breaking and, specifically, the role of the University of Poznań in cracking the German World War II Enigma code. If you ask a typical well-educated Briton who was responsible for breaking the Enigma code they will probably say that it was Alan Turing. In fact, it was three Polish students from the University of Poznań – Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki – and their achievements are celebrated here. The exhibition is detailed and you are given an audio-guide to accompany your visit. Our visit to the Enigma Cypher Centre took the rest of the afternoon.
That evening, rather than go back into the centre to eat and have to negotiate the dug up streets in the dark, we decided to head a little further out from where our hotel was located. I had originally identified an Italian restaurant as a possible dining venue, but when we arrived there we discovered that it was quite small and that there was a band setting up to play. Not wishing to share our food with music at close quarters, we found another restaurant, serving Polish cuisine, a couple of blocks away. We were lucky to secure the only unreserved table, as we had probably the best (and also one of the cheapest) meals in our whole time in the country. I had mini baked potatoes with cottage cheese to start with, followed by pulled duck served in a dumpling with red cabbage. I also had some deliciously creamy local wheat beer to drink.
Day 7 – Sunday 16th October 2022 – Poznań to Warsaw
We discovered that the Poznań Marathon was taking place on this day. The start and finish of the race were close to our hotel and we could hear the loudspeaker announcements from our hotel room. At breakfast we had the opportunity to sample the local St Martin’s croissants, which contain a filling made from white poppy seeds.
After breakfast we set off to walk to the Citadel Park to the north of the city. This contains a number of cemeteries. The Soviet War Cemetery has a massive monument, which has been adorned with graffiti. There is a separate plot for the victims of the 1956 Poznań Uprising, some of whom were only children. The final cemetery we went to was the Commonwealth War Cemetery, where we were joined by some Polish troops paying their respects. This cemetery contains the remains of many of the escapees from Stalag Luft III, whose exploits were dramatised in the film The Great Escape.
Returning to the city centre we crossed the Marathon route just before the first runners were due to arrive. Our next stop was the Museum of the 1956 Poznań Uprising. This occurred in June 1956, starting as workers’ protests about their conditions and food supplies. It was brutally suppressed by the authorities with 57 protesters confirmed as having been killed. The Poznań protests appear to have been largely forgotten in the West, overshadowed by the Hungarian Uprising later that year.
We then made our way to the station, encountering some of the first runners to have finished the Marathon. Our train was due to depart at 1244. It arrived on time, but when we got on it was very full with every seat taken and people standing in the corridor. I was surprised by this, as mandatory seat reservation is a requirement on Polish Inter City trains. It transpired that our train was missing a carriage and we had to wait for over an hour for an additional carriage to be shunted round and attached to the train.
There were two trains from Poznań to Warsaw at about the same time that lunchtime. I had booked on the slower one, because not only was it cheaper, but also I thought it was more likely to be on time as it was not a cross-border train from Germany. Consequently, our train took an interesting route to Warsaw that afternoon, with a number of diversions onto minor lines rather than taking the direct high speed route. We eventually arrived at Warsaw Centralna over an hour late at 1715.
Emerging from Centralna station we had a short walk past the Peoples’ Palace to find the stop for the tram to take us to our hotel in the north of the city. That evening we visited a nearby Italian restaurant and had pizza for our dinner.
Day 8 – Monday 17th October 2022 – Warsaw
In the morning, after leaving our hotel, we travelled by an electric bus to the southern edge of Warsaw to visit the Wilanow Palace. This imposing building was originally built by King Jan Sobieski at the end of the 17th Century. It was damaged, but unlike most of the remainder of Warsaw, it was not completely destroyed in World War II. It has now been fully restored and contains an impressive collection of art and furniture. We chose to have audio-guides to accompany our visit and it took most of the morning to look round.
When we had finished with the interior of the palace, we went for a walk round the grounds, which includes a large lake fed by the nearby Vistula river. As it was now a warm sunny day, we stopped off to get an ice cream as we walked back to catch the bus to the centre of Warsaw. While eating the ice cream on a narrow path we encountered a funeral procession from the church next to the palace going to the cemetery near the bus stop. We tried to get out of the way as respectfully as we could while still licking our ice creams.
The bus took us to the centre of Warsaw, where we caught the Metro for a couple of stops to visit the Warsaw Rising Museum. This museum, which is free to visit on Mondays, recounts the events of summer 1944, when the local resistance rose up against the occupying German forces. At this stage of the war, the Germans were starting to face defeat and the Russian forces had advanced to the east bank of the Vistula, just outside the city. However, the Russians chose not to intervene, allowing the Germans to regroup and destroy the city. This was one of the most shameful episodes of the whole war. We again had audio-guides to assist us on our visit. The museum was busy, with a lot of school parties visiting, and we spent the remainder of the afternoon there until the museum’s closing time.
As we left the museum it was starting to get dark and we walked back through the centre of Warsaw, finding the last remaining piece of the ghetto wall and then through the shopping centre adjoining Centralna station and past the People’s Palace. We went to the Georgian Restaurant that I had previously dined in when I had visited Warsaw in 2018, as part of that year’s Chess Train tournament. On this occasion, I had Lobio as a starter which was an interesting pate-like dish made from beans and walnuts, followed by beef and lamb sausages served with roast potatoes.
Day 9 – Tuesday 18th October 2022 – Warsaw
Before departing on this trip, I had booked on-line tickets for a visit to the Royal Castle for this morning. Before our timed entry slot was due we went for a walk in the Old Town of Warsaw. As with the rest of the city, the Old Town had been completely destroyed at the end of World War II, but this area had been painstakingly restored to look much as it had done previously. Just south of the main square we found a moving exhibition describing some of the many Poles who had been ‘disappeared’ by the Soviet occupiers in the period immediately after the war.
At the appointed time we entered the Royal Castle. This had been completely rebuilt after its wartime destruction and did not reopen until 1984, with final parts not completed until 2019. We had visited previously in 1992, when we remembered parties of very well behaved school children and having to put protective slippers over our shoes. This time we were allowed in without additional footwear and the school parties were less numerous, but nowhere near as regimented as they had been in 1992. The castle had been the main residence of the Kings of Poland and there had been a royal castle on the site since the 14th century. It is ornately decorated throughout and includes a variety of art, including a number of pictures by Jan Matejko, the great Polish historical artist, whose house we had visited in Kraków.
It was early afternoon by the time we had finished in the Castle. From there we walked the short distance to to the Old Town Market Place to visit the Museum of Warsaw, which describes the history of the city. Again, we had been here before in 1992 and I had also visited in 2018 on my Chess Train stopover. This excellent museum occupies eleven former houses located along one side of the Market Place. It took us the rest of the day to complete, following with audio-guides an elaborate one-way system (presumably introduced as a Covid protection measure). One irrelevant fact we learned from the museum was that at the time of our first visit to Warsaw the first kebab shop in the city had not yet been opened – it did not do so until 1993.
After returning to our hotel, when we ventured out again for dinner that evening it was pouring with rain, so we did not wish to spend a long time on the streets looking for somewhere to eat. We went to a pierogi restaurant on the edge of the old town, en route to which I managed to step in a large puddle. I chose Ruthenian dumplings with bacon, followed by apple cake.
Day 10 – Wednesday 19th October 2022 – Warsaw
It was still raining, but not as hard as the night before, when we set off for our final full day of exploring Warsaw. We walked through slight drizzle to the Palace of Culture and Science, where it began to rain more steadily as we arrived. There is a joke that the best viewpoint in Warsaw is from the top of the Palace of Culture, as that is the only place in the city where you can’t see the Palace of Culture. As Stalin’s gift to the Polish people the building is not universally liked. It now has a slightly tatty feel to it compared to the gleaming modern office blocks nearby. We took the lift to the 30th floor viewing platform for views of the city in all directions. There was a noisy demonstration, which swelled in number while we were at the top, taking place in the open space close to the building.
Our next stop was POLIN – the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. This enormous museum is housed in its own modern building, located in what was the World War II Ghetto imposed by the Nazis. It relates the history of Jews in Poland from their first arrival in the 10th century through to the present day. We spent most of the day in the museum, but even so we only had time to view the core permanent exhibition and not the temporary exhibition on Jewish culinary culture.
We left POLIN just in time to get to Warsaw Cathedral in the Old Town before the last entry to the crypt at 5pm. However, when we got to the cathedral there was a group led by a priest entering the crypt and it was not possible to buy a ticket for a visit that day. So we instead looked round the main body of the church, which, as with everything else in the Old Town had been rebuilt after World War II. The reconstruction had reverted the cathedral to an earlier Gothic design, rather than the Baroque building that had been destroyed.
That evening for our final dinner in Poland we went to a restaurant on the edge of the Old Town, where I dined on lentil soup, followed by a mixed grill of pork, beef and chicken, with cheesecake in cherry sauce for dessert.
Day 11 – Thursday 20th October 2022 – Warsaw to London
Straight after breakfast we returned to the Old Town to visit the Warsaw Heritage Interpretation Centre, which opened at 9am and is free to visit on Thursdays. This is a branch of the Museum of Warsaw which describes the reconstruction of the Old Town after its destruction in World War II. This interesting museum was relatively small compared to the others we had visited in Warsaw and we were able to complete our viewing of it in about an hour.
We then had time to return to Warsaw Cathedral to make another attempt to visit the crypt. On this occasion we were successful. Although most of the rulers of Poland are buried in the crypt of the Wawel cathedral in Kraków, Warsaw Cathedral contains the remains of Stansilaw II August, the last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as other Polish notables, such as Jan Paderewski, the pianist and first prime minister of Poland.
After a last walk through the Old Town to pick up our bags from our hotel, we caught a tram to Warsaw Wschodnia station. We tried to buy a ticket at the station to Modlin airport, but the only ticket machines we could find were either for Warsaw public transport or for PKK Inter City trains, rather than for the local trains which served Modlin. I subsequently discovered that Wschodnia station is divided in to two halves , with their own ticket offices and machines on opposite sides of the station, and we had only been in the Inter City half. However, we knew that it was possible to buy tickets on the train, albeit as we discovered at a small premium.
The train took about 40 minutes to Modlin station, which seemed little more than a country halt. There was a bus waiting there for the 10 minute drive to Modlin airport.
Modlin Airport was surprisingly small and there were not many flights due at the time we were there. After having some lunch we went to go through security for which there were no queues. The non-Schengen departure area was not very big and soon became crowded with people waiting for our flight. We occupied our time by watching the resignation of Liz Truss as Britain’s Prime Minister, which she helpfully managed to complete before we had to board the plane. An uneventful journey back saw us get home by about 7pm.
We had really enjoyed our time in Poland, which is now a modern country with good facilities where everything works well – such a contrast to our first visit in 1992. Despite designing this trip to spend longer in each place than on my recent solo long distance train expeditions, we still could have spent twice as long everywhere and still not seen everything we would want to.
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