Warsaw's Right Bank: Praga's Bears, Bazaars, Vodka and Backyard Shrines

A walk through Praga, the Warsaw district the war did not flatten: two cathedrals facing each other, the bears by the bridge, Bazar Różyckiego, cobbled Ząbkowska, the red-brick Koneser vodka works and the courtyard shrines of Brzeska street

Warsaw · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Park Praski Bear Enclosure

al. Solidarności, 03-402 Warszawa, Poland

You have just come off the bridge, the traffic is roaring along the avenue, and behind a fence and a moat on your left, a brown bear is lying on its back in the grass, scratching its stomach. Welcome to Praga, the right bank of Warsaw, where even the wildlife lives on the main road.

The bear enclosure belongs to the Warsaw Zoo, whose grounds stretch north behind Park Praski, and for generations it has been the first sight of Praga for anyone crossing the river by tram. Locals give the bears the same mixture of affection and irony they give the whole district. Over the years more than one reckless visitor has ended up on the wrong side of the fence, and it was never the bear that needed rescuing.

The park around it was laid out in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the first permanent bridge across the Vistula, the Kierbedź Bridge of 1864, finally tied Praga to the city. The bridge you just used stands on that bridge's old piers. The Germans blew it up in 1944, and it was rebuilt in 1949 under a new name, the Śląsko-Dąbrowski Bridge.

Behind the trees, in a modest villa inside the zoo, lived the director Jan Żabiński and his wife Antonina. During the German occupation they hid Jews escaping from the ghetto in the empty animal houses and in their own home, around three hundred people over the years, by most accounts. Antonina had a signal for danger: she would sit at the piano and play an aria from Offenbach. Both were later recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.

That story, a gentle zoo with a terrible secret, sets the tone for Praga. This side of the river looks rough at first and turns out to be full of hidden kindness, shrines, memory and stubborn local pride. Walk east along the avenue, al. Solidarności, until two tall brick spires rise on your right.
2. St Florian's Cathedral

ul. Floriańska 3, 03-707 Warszawa, Poland

Stand on the corner and look up at the two red-brick spires, sharp as pencils, that dominate the whole of Praga's skyline. This is the Cathedral of St Michael the Archangel and St Florian, though everybody in Warsaw simply calls it St Florian's.

It was built between 1888 and 1904 to designs by Józef Pius Dziekoński, in a deliberately Polish Gothic style, red brick like the medieval churches of Kraków and Gdańsk. Dziekoński was the leading church architect of his generation in the Kingdom of Poland and designed many brick churches across the country, but this was his showpiece. The timing was no accident. Warsaw was then ruled by the Russian Empire, and just across the avenue the authorities had already raised a gleaming Orthodox church. It is often said that Praga's Catholics wanted their towers to be taller, and visible from the far bank of the Vistula. At around seventy-five metres, they are.

In September 1944, as the Red Army approached Praga, the retreating Germans blew up both towers, and much of the church came down with them. Across the river, the Warsaw Uprising was still being fought, and the people of Praga could only watch the smoke over the left bank.

After the war, the parishioners rebuilt their church brick by brick, with money and labour gathered over many years, in a state that was officially atheist and in no hurry to help. The work went on into the 1970s. In 1992 St Florian's became the cathedral of the new diocese of Warsaw-Praga.

And why St Florian? He is the patron saint of firefighters, and for wooden, crowded Praga that was a practical choice: the district had burned many times. Polish firefighters still celebrate his feast day, the fourth of May. Folk etymology even ties the name Praga to the old Polish word for roasting or burning, from the forest cleared by fire to make the first fields. Now cross al. Solidarności and look for the five onion domes on the other side.
3. Orthodox Cathedral of St Mary Magdalene

al. Solidarności 52, 03-402 Warszawa, Poland

Five domes catch the light above the trees, and through the gate you can see a church that looks as if it had been flown in from Moscow or Kyiv. This is the Orthodox Cathedral of St Mary Magdalene, and it is older than the Catholic cathedral you just left.

It was built between 1867 and 1869, when Warsaw was part of the Russian Empire. The location was chosen with care: a few steps away stood the new terminus of the railway to St Petersburg, and Praga had a growing population of Russian officials, soldiers and railwaymen. The architect, Nikolai Sychev, gave it the Russian-Byzantine style the empire favoured, and its interior glows with icons and gilded screens.

After Poland regained independence in 1918, most of the Orthodox churches the tsars had built in Warsaw were seen as symbols of foreign rule. The largest, the huge Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on Saxon Square, was demolished in the 1920s. St Mary Magdalene survived, in part because it served a living parish, and today it is the metropolitan cathedral of the Polish Orthodox Church, used by Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians and many others. Orthodox believers are a minority in Poland, a few hundred thousand people, most of them in the east of the country around Białystok.

It also survived the Second World War almost intact, while the Catholic towers across the street were brought down. So, by a twist of history, the church built to show off imperial power is one of the oldest and best-preserved buildings on this side of the river.

If the door is open and a service is on, step quietly into the back. There are no pews in an Orthodox church. People stand, light thin candles, and the choir sings unaccompanied, because instruments are not used. From here, walk on to the corner of Targowa street, where the old railway station still faces the avenue.
4. Targowa Street & Wileński Station

ul. Targowa 72, 03-734 Warszawa, Poland

You are standing at the top of Targowa, Praga's main street, with the old Wileński railway station on the corner and a wide, busy road running south past tram tracks and grand old tenements. Targ means market in Polish, and that is what this street has always been about: buying, selling and bargaining.

For most of its history Praga was not Warsaw at all. It was a separate little town across the river, joined to the city only in 1791. Merchants coming from the east, with cattle, grain and goods, stopped on this side before crossing, and markets grew along this road. In the 1860s the railway to St Petersburg arrived here, later known as the Vilnius line, which is why the station is still called Wileński.

Praga has seen terrible days. On the fourth of November 1794, during the Kościuszko Uprising, Russian troops under General Suvorov stormed Praga's defences and then massacred thousands of its inhabitants, soldiers and civilians alike. And in 1944 Praga lived through another tragedy from a different angle. The Red Army took this bank in mid-September 1944, while the Warsaw Uprising was still being fought on the other side of the Vistula, and halted here until January 1945.

Because Praga was not systematically destroyed after the Uprising, as the left bank was, its nineteenth-century tenements are still standing, with their courtyards, balconies and peeling plaster. That is why film crews come here to recreate pre-war Warsaw. Roman Polański shot scenes of The Pianist in Praga's streets, because the real ones across the river no longer existed.

Under your feet runs metro line 2, which reached Praga in 2015 and brought a wave of new cafés and new residents. Old Praga watches them with a raised eyebrow. Now walk south down Targowa, past the market hall entrances, to the restored tenement with the museum sign at number 50.
5. Museum of Warsaw Praga

ul. Targowa 50/52, 03-733 Warszawa, Poland

Find the modest old houses at Targowa 50 and 52, lower and humbler than the tall apartment buildings around them. This is the Museum of Warsaw Praga, a branch of the Museum of Warsaw that opened in 2015, and it tells the story of the right bank in the voices of the people who live here.

The houses themselves are part of the exhibition. They are among the oldest surviving buildings in Praga, from the nineteenth century, when this street was still lined with low merchants' houses rather than tall apartment blocks. The narrow staircases, the courtyard and the small rooms where whole families once lived together show you how ordinary Praga people actually lived, far from the palaces of the left bank. Inside you can hear recordings of old residents speaking in the Praga dialect, a Warsaw street language full of slang, borrowed words and dark jokes.

The most moving room is at the back. In one of the outbuildings, restorers uncovered the remains of a small Jewish prayer house, with fragments of painted decoration and Hebrew inscriptions still on the walls. Before the war, Jews made up a large part of Praga's population: traders on Targowa, craftsmen, families who prayed in rooms like this one.

In 1940 the German authorities forced the Jews of Praga to leave their homes and move across the river into the ghetto. Almost none of them came back. These faded paintings are among the very few traces of that community still in place on this bank of the Vistula.

The museum also collected photographs and stories of something you will meet in a moment: the little shrines hidden in Praga's courtyards. It is the right place to learn to see them. From here, walk to the next corner and turn into Brzeska street, a few minutes to the east, where the old courtyards begin.
6. Brzeska Street & the Backyard Shrines

ul. Brzeska 12, 03-737 Warszawa, Poland

Walk slowly along Brzeska and glance through the arched gateways as you pass. Beyond the dark passages you will see courtyards, washing lines, a bicycle, a few pigeons... and every so often, against a wall or in a corner, a little glass case with a statue of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by plastic flowers and candles.

These are kapliczki podwórkowe, backyard shrines, and Praga has dozens of them. Most date from the Second World War. Under the German occupation there was a curfew, gathering in large groups was dangerous, and any walk across town could end in a street round-up. So the tenants of each building made a shrine in their own courtyard and prayed there together in the evenings, close to home, behind their own gate.

Many still carry dates and names from those years, or plaques remembering residents who never came back from the camps or from the Uprising. And the tradition did not stop in 1945. In May, the month of Mary, neighbours still gather in some of these courtyards in the evening to sing the old Marian hymns, often led by the oldest women of the house. The shrines are repainted, the flowers are changed, the candles are lit, by people who have never asked anyone for money.

Brzeska itself had a hard reputation. For decades it was spoken of as one of the toughest streets in Warsaw, poor, overcrowded and neglected, the place taxi drivers did not like to stop. In recent years renovation has reached it, and the street is changing fast, but the courtyards still belong to the people who live in them.

So a word of etiquette: these are homes, not museums. Look from the gate, keep your voice down, and if a resident is there, a simple dzień dobry, good day, goes a long way. Now head back toward Targowa and slip into the market that fills the block between Brzeska and Targowa, through its side gate.
7. Bazar Różyckiego

ul. Targowa 54, 03-734 Warszawa, Poland

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.
8. Ząbkowska Street

ul. Ząbkowska 20, 03-736 Warszawa, Poland

Feel the cobbles underfoot and look along the street: rows of tenements with iron balconies, faded inscriptions, dark gateways and, here and there, a freshly painted facade between two that have not been touched for decades. This is Ząbkowska, the most photographed street in Praga.

Its name is simple: this was the road to Ząbki, a village to the north-east, and it became one of Praga's main streets as the district grew in the nineteenth century. Before the war it was full of small shops, workshops and bars, Polish and Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox, with people living above the shop and trading below it. It had its own soundtrack and its own language, the Praga dialect, in which a sharp-witted local operator was a cwaniak and every corner had a nickname.

Imagine it on a pre-war summer evening. Into a courtyard comes a kapela podwórkowa, a courtyard band: an accordion, a banjo, a fiddle, maybe a drum. They play the Warsaw street ballads everybody knows, songs about the river, the market and unhappy love. And from the windows above, residents throw down a few coins wrapped in a twist of paper, so they will not roll away or hit anybody on the head.

The street survived the war, but not prosperity. For decades after 1945 its tenements were neglected, and Ząbkowska became a byword for poverty. Then, from the 2000s, artists, bars and clubs moved in, and the street became the symbol of the new Praga. Even now, an old man in a flat cap and a young designer with a laptop may share the same doorway.

Look up at the walls between the windows. On some of them you can still spot the scars of bullets and shrapnel, small pits in the brick, from September 1944. Nobody plastered them over. Now carry on east along Ząbkowska, until the red-brick walls of a great old factory appear on your left.
9. Koneser Vodka Works & Polish Vodka Museum

pl. Konesera 1, 03-736 Warszawa, Poland

Walk through the gate and into the square, and you are surrounded by red brick: tall factory walls, a chimney, arched windows and old industrial halls, all scrubbed and restored. This is Koneser, once the Warsaw vodka works, now one of the city's most striking new quarters.

The factory was opened in 1897, when Warsaw belonged to the Russian Empire and vodka was a state monopoly. The authorities built a modern plant here to purify and bottle spirit, right beside the railways that brought grain and alcohol in and took the bottles out. For more than a century the factory worked almost without a break, through two world wars and communism, and production here ended only in 2007.

Since 2018 the old rectification building has housed the Polish Vodka Museum. It tells the story of a drink that Poles consider very much their own. The word wódka is a diminutive of woda, water, so it literally means little water. And Polish tradition likes to point out that the word first appears in writing in the Polish lands in 1405, in court records from Sandomierz.

Vodka in Poland is a ritual with rules. A small glass, ice-cold, drunk in one go after a toast, then immediately something to eat: a pickled cucumber, herring, a slice of bread with lard. Drinking without food is considered bad manners, and a polite Pole will keep filling your plate as carefully as your glass. The toast is the simplest one: na zdrowie, to your health. And a proud host will remind you that vodka labelled Polish must be made in Poland from local grain or potatoes.

The transformation of Koneser sums up the new Praga: housing, offices and shops in buildings that once smelled of spirit, on a street where until recently few outsiders dared to walk at night. From here, take Markowska street south to Kijowska and the great railway station on the edge of the district.
10. Warszawa Wschodnia Station

ul. Kijowska 20, 03-743 Warszawa, Poland

Ahead of you lies Warszawa Wschodnia, the East Station: a long, low terminal, dozens of tracks and a constant murmur of announcements and rolling wheels. It is not a pretty place, but it is the reason much of Praga looks the way it does.

In the 1860s, two railway lines arrived on the right bank within a few years of each other. One, from Targowa street, ran to St Petersburg. The other, from a station on this spot, ran east to Terespol on the Bug river and, beyond it, deep into the Russian Empire. Warsaw's other great stations stood on the far side of the Vistula, so Praga became the city's gateway to the east.

Where the trains went, industry followed. Cheap land beside the tracks, cheap workers from the countryside, and easy freight drew metalworks, mills and warehouses. The Koneser vodka works chose its site beside the railway, and in the early 1930s the chocolate makers E. Wedel, founded in 1851, opened a large factory a short walk south of here. People in this part of Praga still say that on certain days the wind smells of chocolate.

Railways also made Praga a target. In 1944 the retreating Germans wrecked tracks, bridges and stations, and this bank then lay on the front line until January 1945. Throughout the occupation, these lines carried troops and supplies toward the Eastern Front, and the people of Praga lived with the traffic of war at their doorstep. The station was rebuilt after the war, and rebuilt again more than once since. Today long-distance trains stop here on their way across Poland, and for many travellers arriving from the east, this is still their first glimpse of Warsaw.

Use the passage under the tracks to reach Lubelska street on the other side, then walk east and turn into Mińska street, where the old factory halls of Kamionek begin.
11. Kamionek & the Mińska Street Factories

ul. Mińska 25, 03-808 Warszawa, Poland

Around you rise long brick halls with tall windows, water towers and chimneys, some still bare and industrial, others turned into lofts with glass extensions and neat lawns. You are on Mińska street, in Kamionek, and this is the last chapter of our right-bank story.

Kamionek is a surprise. Long before Praga grew into a town, there was a village here, one of the oldest settlements around Warsaw, with its own church on the edge of the old river valley. A few streets away a small lake, the Kamionek pond, is a remnant of an old arm of the Vistula, a reminder that the river once wandered across this whole plain.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the fields gave way to factories. Along Mińska and the neighbouring streets stood workshops and industrial plants, including, before the war, works serving the state armaments industry. A few kilometres east lies Grochów, where on the twenty-fifth of February 1831 Polish and Russian armies fought one of the bloodiest battles of the November Uprising, in the alder grove of Olszynka Grochowska.

When the factories closed after the fall of communism, many of these sites stood empty. Then, from the 2000s, developers and artists discovered them. Brick halls became studios, galleries, design offices and apartments, and the old Praga paradox appeared once again: the places Warsaw once avoided became the places Warsaw wanted to live.

So look back over the walk you have done. Bears beside a highway, two rival cathedrals facing each other, a pharmacist's bazaar, shrines in courtyards, a vodka factory turned museum and finally these halls. Praga is the part of Warsaw where the past was not swept away and rebuilt from drawings, but simply lived on, cracked and patched. Skaryszewski Park lies just south of here if you want a green ending, and trams on Grochowska will carry you back across the river.