Tuesday, June 3, 2008

History of Warsaw

According to legend, Warsaw received its name from two children, Wars and Sawa.

Syrenka, a mermaid from the Wisła, predicted the founding of Warsaw to the pair, who then gave their names to the city.

Warsaw was founded around the turn of the 14th century by Duke Bolesław of Mazovia, then an independent principality.

In 1413 Warsaw became the regional capital.

At that time its population was about 4,500.

The city lay on major trade routes, benefiting from its location on the Wisła.

In 1526, when the last Mazovian prince died without an heir, Warsaw was absorbed into the Polish state.

The Sejm, Poland’s parliament, began meeting in Warsaw in the 1550s.

In 1573, four years after Poland united with Lithuania, the nobility began choosing the king in royal elections on Warsaw’s Wola Field.

King Zygmunt III transferred the capital of Poland from Kraków to Warsaw in 1596.

The move brought Zygmunt closer to the Baltic Sea, where he had territorial ambitions.

By 1611 the court and government had completed the move to Warsaw, which remained the capital for the next 200 years.

In the mid-17th century Sweden invaded the Polish-Lithuanian state and devastated Warsaw.

Russian forces occupied the city several times in the 18th century.

Only with Stanisław II Augustus, the last king of Poland, did Warsaw undergo major regeneration; from 1764 to 1792 its population nearly quadrupled, rising from 30,000 to 110,000.

In 1795, after Poland had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria for the third time, Warsaw declined to a provincial town in Prussia.

In 1807 French Emperor Napoleon I established the independent Duchy of Warsaw and made the city the region’s capital.

Warsaw revived as a satellite state and a launching pad for Napoleon’s campaign against Russia in 1812.

After Napolean's defeat, Warsaw became the capital in 1815 of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, a state under Russian rule.

The Poles rebelled against their Russian overlords in 1830.

The Russians crushed the revolt and reduced Warsaw to provincial status once more.

Nonetheless urban development continued.

A permanent fire service was established in 1834, a railway line was built to Vienna in 1848, and in 1859 the first iron bridge across the Wisła was constructed.

After a second failed insurrection in 1863, the Polish kingdom was completely absorbed into the Russian empire.

Despite these periods of political upheaval, industrialization continued in Warsaw, and an influx of workers and expansion of the city caused the population to swell to 406,000 by 1885.

But it was not until 1918, after Russia’s emperor was toppled and the Central Powers lost World War I (1914-1918), that Warsaw once again became capital of an independent Polish state.

On the eve of World War II (1939-1945), Warsaw’s population had reached more than 1 million.

On September 1, 1939, Warsaw was the target of the first German air raids on a major city.

After numerous bombing and artillery attacks, the city fell to Nazi troops on September 27.

Throughout the war Warsaw was the main center of a rump Polish state, although the Germans intended eventually to reduce Warsaw to a resort solely for German habitation. It was also the center of the Polish underground army.

The Germans systematically plundered the city of art treasures, razed national monuments, and terrorized the populace in a calculated plan to annihilate Jewish and Polish identity.

In late 1940 the Germans established a walled ghetto less than 2.6 sq km (1 sq mi) in total area and herded Jews from the city and the surrounding region into it.

Over the next two and a half years hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced into the ghetto and then sent to concentration camps.

In April 1943 the Jews in the ghetto staged a heroic month-long resistance.

After the Nazis put down the uprising they destroyed the ghetto, killing or sending to camps all of the remaining inhabitants.

Some 500,000 Warsaw-area Jews died in all.

On August 1, 1944, as Soviet armies neared the city, the Polish resistance rose against the Germans before finally succumbing in October with some 160,000 fatalities.

After the uprising, German troops deported the remainder of the population and deliberately destroyed what remained of the city.

Of the city's prewar population only 162,000 survived the war.

Soviet and Polish troops entered Warsaw in January 1945.

After the war, the capital was rebuilt. Where possible, the original plans were followed in the reconstruction of historic buildings and districts.

After 1945, as the key administrative structures were reestablished for the centralized Communist government in Warsaw, the city was rapidly repopulated.

By 1956 the city’s population again topped 1 million.

From the 1950s to the early 1970s Warsaw was the center of political power in Poland, a satellite country of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union).

Warsaw served as the symbolic base for the Soviet-led military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact.

As the country hit economic crisis towards the end of the 1970s Warsaw's urban structure began to deteriorate, mirroring the decline in the credibility of the Communist party and the system it represented.

After the Communist government collapsed in 1989 and Poland adopted a market economy, Warsaw’s economy revived.

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