Masovia
Discover Masovia
Introduction
Masovia is the flat central province of Poland, on the Vistula, and it contains the capital. Warsaw is a city that has to be understood through 1944: the Germans destroyed something like eighty-five per cent of it after the uprising, and the old town standing today was rebuilt from photographs, drawings and eighteenth-century Bellotto paintings. UNESCO listed it specifically for that — not as a survival but as an act of reconstruction.
The rest of the city reads as the twentieth century in layers: the Palace of Culture, a Stalinist gift nobody asked for and everybody now photographs; the POLIN museum of the history of Polish Jews, built on the ground of the ghetto; Warsaw Rising Museum; and the glass towers that went up after 1989. Łazienki park holds a summer season of Chopin concerts under his monument.
Outside Warsaw the province is farmland, river meadow and forest. Żelazowa Wola, where Chopin was born, is an hour west. The Kampinos forest begins at the city’s edge and is large enough for elk. To the south, the medieval town of Płock sits above the Vistula on a bluff, and Treblinka, one of the extermination camps, is north-east of the capital and is a place of memorial rather than of visiting in any ordinary sense. Summers are warm, winters cold and grey, and May and September are the best months.