Ujazdów Castle & the Piaseczyński Canal

Why is it significant?

Walk round to the eastern terrace of the castle and look down: a long, perfectly straight canal runs away from you between rows of trees, a silver line pointing towards the Vistula.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk round to the eastern terrace of the castle and look down: a long, perfectly straight canal runs away from you between rows of trees, a silver line pointing towards the Vistula. Behind you stands Ujazdów Castle, a square building with four corner towers, and it has had more lives than almost anything else in Warsaw.

This escarpment is older than the city. Long before Warsaw existed, the Dukes of Mazovia had a wooden stronghold here called Jazdów, and the story usually told is that after a raid in 1262 they moved their seat north, to the place where the Royal Castle now stands. In the sixteenth century Queen Bona Sforza kept a manor here, and in the 1620s King Sigismund the Third Vasa, the same king who stands on the column in the Old Town, built a proper brick castle.

Then came the long fall. In 1784 King Stanisław August, busy with his new palace in the park below, gave it up, and the castle was turned into army barracks. In the nineteenth century it became a military hospital, its towers stripped and its rooms divided into wards. It burned in September 1939, and in the early 1950s the ruins were pulled down. For twenty years there was nothing on the hill but grass.

And then, from the 1970s, the castle was rebuilt from old drawings, and since the 1980s it has been the Centre for Contemporary Art, one of the liveliest in Poland. A Vasa royal residence full of video installations and experimental theatre: Warsaw enjoys that kind of paradox.

The canal below, the Kanał Piaseczyński, was dug in the early eighteenth century as part of a great baroque axis running towards the river. Herons stand in its shallows at dawn, and in winter it freezes into a perfect avenue of ice. Now go back to Aleje Ujazdowskie and walk a little further south, to the gate of the university's botanical garden, where a king's unfinished promise lies hidden among the trees.