Each Saturday throughout August, you will find a 1950’s blue bus standing near to Coffee Heaven at Plac Teatralny. This is a Jelcz 043, manufactured in Poland in 1974 with Skoda engine – nicknamed ‘ogórek’ (cucumber) – holding about 30 passengers, and will take you on a free tour of different districts of the city, off the beaten track.
The bus starts shakily up and after a brief introduction from one of the tour guides, we head off to a soundtrack of Sen o Warszawie, a 1966 song from Czesław Niemen, where he sings about his colourful dreams of the city. As we take the corner by Hotel Victoria, the driver’s door swings open and doesn’t want to close again. He deftly negotiates the roundabouts of central Warsaw while holding onto it. Fortunately the bus can’t manage much more than 40 kilometres an hour flat out.
Our first tour takes us to the boundary of the 19th century city and beyond Mokotów, to the fringes of Sadyba and Stegny, large residential high rise estates built in the Sixties and Seventies. The Stegny estate was designed to channel air. From the west the estate is sheathed from the cold air by long 11 storey buildings, so it’s not too warm and not too cold. Finally, we take a walk through Park Morskie Oko, built at the end of the 18th century for Princess Izabela Lubomirska.
Our second tour wanders past Plac Politechniki with a brief stop at Lwowska Street, where we pass through a gate to a rear courtyard to find Rusiecki Palace, built in 1912. The apartment block in front, which encloses it, is also an original building, surviving the war. The bus putters along through the backstreets of Śródmieście and Powiśle, culminating in a tour of the new Legia Warszawa stadium. The stadium opened with a pre-season match against Arsenal, who won (just about).
The old stadium held 14,000 and the new one has a capacity of 23,000 (though they still have to complete one side). We are allowed on the fake grass by the side of the pitch, but not the real grass. Our Legia guide tells us that not even the groundsmen are allowed much time on this hallowed turf. He says, No-one is allowed on this pitch, only the players. The only ones with unlimited access are the pigeons, as you can see.
From the top of the stands, almost a birds eye view of Warsaw. The new national stadium rising up on the other side of the river, the Palace of Culture downtown, the sports and athletica fields of Ulica Agricola, Ujazdowski Castle nearby – which houses a centre for contemporary art – but much of the city is obscured by greenery from this vantage point.
Below the stadium, towards the river, is a memory of old Warsaw. The decaying remnants of a swimming pool, a partially ruined mosaic at its former entrance. The pool has been long filled in with dirt, trees and bushes growing there. A high concrete diving platform still stands, a smudge of blue paint on the floor surface, a recollection of Socialist leisure and health. The river, smelling powerfully in the heat, is hidden from our view, the few remaining beer and vodka bars along the embankments obscured.
Note: The tour is one of several projects organised by a cultural association, Centrum Europy, aiming to give a new perspective to the city. In 2006 they published a guidebook to the right bank of Warsaw, by Michał Pilich, in English and Polish, and an accompanying web site, both of which we recommend.
