The Royal Route

There isn’t a foreigner or a local who hasn’t walked on at least part of the Royal Route that leads to the Old Town. This is Warsaw’s calling card; it can be found on postcards and in every coffee-table book about Warsaw. The Royal Route owes its name to the fact that it links various Warsaw residences of Polish kings since the 17th century. It stretches from the Old Town’s Castle Square, where the kings had their main residence, to the Wilanów Palace, to which they retired in summer, via the Ujazdów hunting palace and the impressive Łazienki Park with the Palace on the Water.

Along the Royal Route, Krakowskie Przedmieście Street is one of Warsaw’s main thoroughfares that goes back to the 16th century, when King Sigismund III Vasa moved the royal seat and capital from Cracow to Warsaw. At the time many aristocrats wanted to establish their residences along the street to be near the king.

Today, the boulevard is lined with the Presidential Palace, University of Warsaw buildings and several historic churches and manor houses from the 17th and 18th centuries. It also houses the prestigious Bristol Hotel, many boutique hotels and the recently closed Europejski Hotel.

Nowy Świat Street is an extension of Krakowskie Przedmieście, and also dates back to the mid-17th century. Some call it Warsaw’s Champs-Élysées. It was razed to the ground during World War II and like the Old Town was reconstructed after the war. Today, with its 19th-century neo-classical appearance, the long avenue is lined with boutiques, cafés and restaurants. A number of personalities from the Polish art and literary world lived here, among them Polish-born writer Joseph Conrad.

Whether you want to hear an open-air concert, have a meal or a beer, buy some fine art or interesting souvenirs, this part of the Royal Route is for you. In the Old Town, and then along Krakowskie Przedmieście and Nowy Świat streets, restaurants serve a variety of cuisines from traditional Polish specialties to international, including fusion, Thai and Indian. Poland prides itself on cakes and pastries produced by family businesses, including the historic Blikle on Nowy Świat. Here among art galleries and boutiques you can also find Irish pubs, beer gardens and clubs.

If you haven’t been along at least the first leg of the Royal Route and the Old Town, you haven’t been to Warsaw.

Ronald Reagan monument in Warsaw

On 21 November 2011, former Solidarity leader and former Polish President Lech Walesa unveiled a monument to President Ronald Reagan in Warsaw. A ceremony featuring Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first non-Communist prime minister in post-war Poland, eight American Senators, and many of Poland’s political elites accompanied the unveiling.

Former Polish President and anti-communist leader Lech Walesa looks up at a statue to former US president Ronald Reagan after unveiled it on November 21, 2011 in Warsaw

In 2008, Warsaw’s City Council accepted Janusz K. Dorosiewicz’s proposal to erect a monument to Ronald Reagan in the Polish capital. The statue was intended to be the first honoring Reagan in Europe, yet due to conflicts related to the difference in artistic visions between Dorosiewicz, the president of the Ronald Reagan Foundation, and Adam Myjak, the former dean of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and sculptor of the monument, the monument’s creation was pushed back in time. As a result, this will be the third monument to Reagan in Europe. Monuments honoring Reagan were unveiled in Budapest and London in June and July of this year.

The Warsaw statue is 3.5 meters tall (about 11.5 feet) and faces the United States Embassy in Poland. It can be found alongside Warsaw’s Traktat Krolewski (“Royal Route”), which contains the country’s Parliament as well as many embassies.

It depicts a smiling Reagan in a historic moment – June 1987, when he delivered a speech in Berlin in which he challenged then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
Reagan was referring to the Berlin Wall, which came to define the Cold War and the division between eastern and western Europe.

This will probably not be the only monument to Reagan in Poland. In Gdansk, former Solidarity activists and Communist era political prisoners have petitioned municipal authorities to erect a monument of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II walking side by side in the Przymorze Park. Thus far the idea has received the support of local Church officials as well as of Pawel Adamowicz, the mayor of Gdansk.

Meanwhile, Stanislaw Rachwal, a member of Krakow’s city council, proposed the erection of an obelisk honoring Reagan in the exact place where Poland’s most grandiose statue of Lenin once stood. The city council announced it will take into consideration Rachwal’s idea.

Twenty-two years after the collapse of Communism, Ronald Reagan remains a profoundly popular historical figure in Poland. Because of his financial and moral support of the Solidarity trade union in the 1980s, as well as his tough stand against the Soviet Union, perhaps best symbolized by his Strategic Defense Initiative, many Poles believe that Reagan greatly contributed to the fall of Communism in their country and in the world. The recent rush to build monuments honoring the American leader in Poland attest to this sentiment.

Other eastern European nations, including Hungary, have also unveiled monuments to Reagan this year, commemorating what would have been his 100th birthday.