Masovia Events

The Masovian calendar mixes national commemoration with a strong summer festival season, and one date dominates everything.

The Warsaw Rising anniversary — 1 August

At five o’clock in the afternoon, the hour the insurrection began in 1944, air-raid sirens sound across the city and Warsaw stops. Traffic halts, drivers get out of their cars, pedestrians stand still, and for a minute the capital is silent. It is observed with genuine seriousness by people of every age, and it is among the most affecting things a visitor can witness in Poland. The evening brings commemorations at the insurgent cemetery and singing of Rising songs in the streets.

Chopin concerts — May to September

Free open-air piano recitals in Lazienki Park beneath the Chopin monument, every Sunday at noon and four in the afternoon through the summer. People bring blankets and sit on the grass. It is one of the best free things in any European capital.

The International Chopin Piano Competition — every five years, October

Held since 1927 at the Warsaw Philharmonic and among the most demanding competitions in music. The city follows it closely and it is broadcast everywhere.

All Saints’ Day — 1 November

Poland’s cemeteries fill with candles. Families travel across the country to tend graves, and by nightfall the Powazki cemetery in Warsaw — where much of the country’s cultural and political history is buried — is an expanse of tens of thousands of flames in coloured glass lanterns. It is a public holiday, it is enormously well attended, and it is quite unlike the northern European idea of a graveyard in autumn.

Through the year

Fat Thursday before Lent, when Warsaw eats an extraordinary quantity of paczki and the queues outside the good bakeries run down the street. Boze Cialo processions at the June feast of the Body of Christ. Christmas markets and the illuminated Royal Route through December, and Wigilia on Christmas Eve, which empties the city as everyone goes home.