Bazar Różyckiego
Why is it significant?
Inside the market, rows of small stalls and metal kiosks run in every direction: socks, cheap tools, pickles, flowers, religious pictures, a woman selling homemade cakes from a folding table. It may look modest, but you are standing in a Warsaw legend, Bazar Różyckiego.
Key Facts
| Place | Bazar Różyckiego |
|---|---|
| Address | ul. Targowa 54, 03-734 Warszawa, Poland |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.25230, 21.04010 |
| Part of Walk | Warsaw's Right Bank: Praga's Bears, Bazaars, Vodka and Backyard Shrines |
| Generated | Generated |
Inside the market, rows of small stalls and metal kiosks run in every direction: socks, cheap tools, pickles, flowers, religious pictures, a woman selling homemade cakes from a folding table. It may look modest, but you are standing in a Warsaw legend, Bazar Różyckiego.
The market was founded in 1901 by a pharmacist, Julian Różycki, who bought this land and turned it into a trading yard. It quickly became the busiest market on the right bank, and it has been trading, in one form or another, ever since. That makes it the oldest working bazaar in the city. The name stuck so firmly that Varsovians still say they are going na Różyckiego, to Różycki's, as if they were dropping in on the pharmacist himself.
Under the German occupation, when almost everything was rationed or forbidden, the bazaar became a world of its own. Food, clothes, false documents... and, the story goes, even pistols for the underground could be found here if you knew whom to ask. After the war, in communist Poland, it kept the same reputation: one of the few places where private trade survived, where you could buy blue jeans, imported records, or dollars changed quietly at the back.
And it fed people. The great taste of Bazar Różyckiego was pyzy, soft potato dumplings with a meat filling, sold hot by market women straight from big pots wrapped in quilts to keep them warm. Old Varsovians still talk about pyzy from Różyckiego with the same nostalgia others reserve for their first love. Some traders kept the tradition going long after the shops of the city were full.
Supermarkets and shopping malls hit the bazaar hard after 1989, and many stalls closed. But it has survived another century of change, and plans to revive it come and go like the seasons. Leave through the northern gate onto Ząbkowska street, the cobbled heart of old Praga.