The Warsaw Barbican: Medieval Gateway Between Two Towns

Why is it significant?

Walk across the stone bridge and enter the curved red-brick courtyard of the Warsaw Barbican. Run your hand along the thick defensive walls: narrow gun slits and battlements frame views of the moat garden below, where artists display oil paintings and buskers play accordions.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk across the stone bridge and enter the curved red-brick courtyard of the Warsaw Barbican. Run your hand along the thick defensive walls: narrow gun slits and battlements frame views of the moat garden below, where artists display oil paintings and buskers play accordions.

Designed in fifteen forty-eight by Venetian military architect Giovanni Battista the Venetian, this horseshoe-shaped bastion was built to defend the northern gate of Warsaw with heavy artillery. Ironically, by the time it was finished, rapid advancements in siege cannons made such brick forts obsolete; it was used defensively only once, during the Swedish Deluge of sixteen fifty-six.

In the nineteenth century, the city dismantled parts of the walls to build apartment blocks. Following the war, architects used historic bricks from destroyed towns in Silesia to rebuild the Barbican as a dramatic historic walkway.

Turn back toward Castle Square and stroll down Krakowskie Przedmieście, Warsaw's elegant Royal Route.