St Alexander's Church & the Square of Three Crosses

Why is it significant?

Stand on the edge of the traffic island and look at the little white church in front of you: a columned portico, a triangular pediment, a shallow dome. If you have ever been to Rome, you have met its big brother.

Key Facts

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Stand on the edge of the traffic island and look at the little white church in front of you: a columned portico, a triangular pediment, a shallow dome. If you have ever been to Rome, you have met its big brother. This is the Church of St Alexander, and it was built as a small, neat homage to the Pantheon. Its name is a political compliment. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Russian tsar Alexander the First also became King of Poland, and Warsaw wanted to greet him in style. The architect Chrystian Piotr Aigner gave the city this classical temple between 1818 and 1825. At the end of the nineteenth century it was inflated into a huge church with two towers... and in 1944 that big church was wrecked. After the war the builders chose to bring back Aigner's original, modest version. So what you see is the younger self of the building, resurrected, not its last incarnation. Now count the crosses. The square is called Plac Trzech Krzyży, the Square of Three Crosses, yet you will find two of them standing on tall columns, raised in the time of King Augustus the Strong, when this was the start of a Way of the Cross leading south. Where is the third? Ask three Varsovians and you may get three answers... the usual one points to the top of the church. Then there is the stone saint by the roadway, John of Nepomuk, set up in 1752 by the Crown Marshal Franciszek Bieliński. He celebrates something wonderfully unholy: the paving of Warsaw's muddy streets. Picture a city so proud of its new cobbles that it commissioned a saint to say thank you for them. From this square the city's grandest road sets off south: Aleje Ujazdowskie, laid out for kings, lined with lime trees, villas and embassies, and ending in a royal park of lakes, palaces, peacocks and red squirrels. That is our walk, the green southern end of Warsaw's Royal Route, from stone to water. Cross to the start of the avenue and follow its shady western pavement south, towards the corner of Piękna street.