Copernicus Monument & Zamoyski Palace

Why is it significant?

The man in bronze holding a compass and an armillary sphere is Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who moved the Earth out of the centre of the universe. Behind him rises the classical Staszic Palace, and just across the street stands a plain, handsome building with a plaque on it.

Key Facts

Open the walk

The man in bronze holding a compass and an armillary sphere is Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who moved the Earth out of the centre of the universe. Behind him rises the classical Staszic Palace, and just across the street stands a plain, handsome building with a plaque on it. Keep both in view.

The statue is the work of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and it was unveiled in May 1830, the last spring Chopin spent in Warsaw. The collection to pay for it was started by Stanisław Staszic, the priest and reformer whose palace behind it housed the Society of Friends of Learning. During the German occupation a teenage scout called Alek Dawidowski unscrewed the German plaque the occupiers had fixed to the pedestal. In 1944 the Germans carted the statue away, and it came home only after the war.

Now turn to the Zamoyski Palace across the road. In September 1863, during the January Uprising against Russian rule, conspirators threw bombs from its windows at the carriage of the Russian governor, Fyodor Berg. He survived. The reprisal was immediate: soldiers stormed the building and smashed everything they found.

On an upper floor lived Chopin's sister Izabela, and in her flat stood a piano that the family said Fryderyk had played as a young man. The soldiers threw it out of the window onto the cobbles. Chopin had been dead for fourteen years, but in Warsaw it felt as if he had been attacked again. The poet Cyprian Norwid turned the scene into a poem, Chopin's Piano, with its famous line that the ideal had struck the pavement.

So in a single glance you hold the whole paradox of this city: a monument raised to science in a moment of hope, and a window remembered for an act of violence against music. From here, keep the church of the Holy Cross on your left and walk north along Krakowskie Przedmieście to the elegant palace just beyond it, now home to the Academy of Fine Arts.