Warsaw from above

From up high, the view of Warsaw stretches out like a history book thrown open mid-sentence. The five-star hotel InterContinental Warsaw offers a good look at the city. It’s the tallest hotel in Poland, but it’s overshadowed by another nearby building right outside my window. The Palac Kultury is the tallest building in Poland and one of the most controversial since many consider it to be a symbol of Soviet domination.

The Palace of Culture and Science is Stalin’s unwanted gift, wrapped in stone. Built at the peak of Stalinism, it’s still highly controversial and locals seem to a love-hate relationship with this place. Some groups even call for its demolition. Meanwhile, the 42nd floor is a nesting place for falcons and reportedly there are even cats living on the second floor.

Palac Kultury as seen from my room at InterContinental.

The Warsaw outside my window is also a long way from the bleak city evoked by David Bowie and Brian Eno in the haunting song “Warszawa” from 1977. The year before recording it, Bowie had traveled by train with Iggy Pop and others from Zürich toward Moscow.

Passing through Poland, they encountered a landscape still carrying the scars of war. Damaged buildings, bullet holes and the sort of grey post-war melancholy that tends not to appear in railway brochures. You can hear some of that atmosphere in the music. Cold, distant, beautiful and vaguely unsettling. All these years later, Warsaw is playing a very different tune.

Barbican in the old town.

Tourists are arriving in increasing numbers, and the city is beginning to compete with Kraków for their attention. Kraków has the medieval charm and postcard looks. Warsaw has something rougher and perhaps more interesting: the peculiar confidence of a place that has already survived the worst anyone could throw at it.

I sit down with a coffee at Rynek Starego Miasta, surrounded by meticulously restored façades, and watch people wander through a medieval square that was reduced to rubble in 1944. Warsaw has been knocked down, occupied, rebuilt, renamed and argued over more times than seems reasonable. Yet here it is.