The city rebuilt from paintings

By January 1945 something like eighty-five per cent of Warsaw was rubble, and the destruction of the historic centre had been deliberate and systematic rather than incidental to fighting. The decision to rebuild it as it had been, rather than as something new, was made almost immediately and was not obvious at the time.

The sources were unusual. Bernardo Bellotto — Canaletto's nephew — had painted twenty-six large, precise views of Warsaw in the 1770s, and they were accurate enough to work from. So were pre-war architecture students' measured drawings, which had been made as coursework and hidden during the occupation. Photographs filled the gaps.

The result is not a facsimile and does not pretend to be. Details were compressed, later accretions were removed, and the version of Warsaw that was rebuilt is roughly the eighteenth-century one rather than the 1939 one. Purists at the time objected that this was falsification. UNESCO listed it in 1980 anyway, and the citation is explicit: the value is in the reconstruction itself, as an act.

Dresden made the opposite decision for forty years and then reversed it. The Frauenkirche was left as a heap of blackened stone through the GDR period, deliberately, as a memorial. After 1989 it was rebuilt, with every recoverable original stone returned to its computed position — which is why the finished church is piebald, dark blocks scattered through pale new ones.

Rotterdam, flattened in 1940, decided not to rebuild at all, and became the most modern city in the Netherlands as a direct consequence. Its architecture is an argument that the past is not owed a reconstruction.

There is no right answer among the three, and the interesting thing for a visitor is that all three are visitable within a day's travel of each other and make the argument in physical form.

Go to Warsaw's old town knowing it is a reconstruction. It does not diminish it. It is the whole point of it.