English / The Villages of Warsaw
About the project
How many villages were there within the current administrative boundaries of Warsaw? What were their names and what remains of them today? Traces of rural buildings, work and life are still present, and they are intertwined with the urban infrastructure. We want to identify and examine them as a gesture of foregrounding the rural past of the capital city.
The aim of The Villages of Warsaw project is to create an organised database of knowledge about the spatial history of Warsaw, showing its diversity on several levels. As Warsaw expanded in size, it absorbed more and more villages and rural areas. In their place, an urban fabric emerged, with huge housing estates, streets and expressways, industrial and office districts. Our aim is to name these villages, to restore them to public consciousness, and also to realise how the history of crops and plants, animals and people is present within the city’s identity, how it affects the diversity of individual places on the map of Warsaw and its residents.
On the social plane, The Villages of Warsaw project also refers to the diversity of the identities of Warsaw’s residents. The capital typically attracts people from all over the country, including those from rural areas. When examining the history of Warsaw and the transformation of the rural into the urban, we will look not only at spatial aspects, but also at social ones that influence the characteristics of the capital’s residents. We are particularly interested in future scenarios, disrupting spatial orders, conceptualising urban farms. We want to on traditional methods of ensuring well-being and food security on the one hand, and on the other adapting them to today’s needs and ideas, actively practicing them on the somewhat liminal border between the city and the countryside.
As part of the project, we focus not only on historical themes, but also on architectural, landscape, social, and natural themes. These form the foundation for themed walks discovering rural roots, but also the present and future of the coexistence of urban and rural formations.
The result of these activities is also a map of selected villages that once existed in present-day Warsaw, printed in 2,000 copies. A full-length catalogue of several dozen villages can be found on the website, which also contains a bibliography of scientific resources and texts expounding on the theme of rurality as a dimension of Warsaw’s diversity.
The Bęc Zmiana Foundation project is co-financed by the Capital City of Warsaw as part of The Diverse Warsaw Programme.
Curator: Bogna Świątkowska
Coordination and promotion: Paula Polak
Graphic design: Aleksandra Sowińska
Website: Michał Szota
Cooperation: National Institute of Rural Culture and Heritage
Partnership: Puszka Foundation for Urban Action and Research
Media patronage: NN6T
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The Villages of Warsaw. The Map
The texts describing the former villages, a selection of which we present on the printed map, were prepared by Jerzy Szałygin – an ethnographer, conservator of monuments, museum curator, social activist working with NGOs involved in the protection of cultural monuments in Poland, president of the Terpa Foundation for the Protection of Common Cultural Heritage, expert of the Association of Monument Conservators for the assessment of cultural property protection and immovable cultural property protection, specialist in documentation and implementation of research projects, as well as construction and conservation analyses related to monuments. The map was designed by Aleksandra Sowińska.
The village of Warsaw was first mentioned in 1224, then in 1251, and became a town around 1300. Through incorporation, over the next several hundred years, it expanded its borders to include at least 175 villages, settlements, and jurydyki, or privately owned estates (they were included within the city limits if they were related to the peasant economy) and 72 farms (all described in 170 notes in the “Catalogue of villages, settlements, housing estates, and farms incorporated into the boundaries of Warsaw”), forming the historical surroundings of the city, developed over the course of centuries and which, in fact, constitute the present fabric of our contemporary lives.
Jerzy Szałygin, excerpt from the introduction
phot. Aleksandra Sowińska
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Walks organised as part of the 2025 edition
Let’s go south! A walk around the MOST Cooperative Farm
Guide: Maciej Łepkowski, PhD – lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, member of the Ekopolis team at CoopTech Hub, involved in urban spatial development issues with a focus on nature and food. Long-time participant in the Otwarty Jazdów initiative. Board member of Pracownia Dóbr Wspólnych Foundation, co-creator of Bujna Warszawa, a community gardening support programme, as well as numerous educational and research initiatives in this field. He devoted his doctoral thesis to the subject of wasteland and informal green areas in the city, and is currently co-creating MOST, a cooperative farm in Warsaw’s Siekierki district.
The MOST Farm covers 3.6 hectares in Warsaw’s Siekierki district. The area, formerly allotment gardens and farmland before that, is still listed as agricultural land in the land register. MOST is a space where we test and develop the idea of an agri-park – an urban area for food production, education and rebuilding our relationship with the landscape.
During the walk, we will talk about how we are putting this idea into practice. We will show you our practices related to the farm’s metabolism: from resource circulation and cultivation methods to the tackling of invasive species. We will talk about the role of the cooperative and the importance of a nature scientist in our management structures.
We will also talk more about the area in which we operate, namely the historic Urzecze, stretching along the Vistula valley from Mokotów to Góra Kalwaria; about the landscape and history of this place as an example of a feeding zone based on the bioregions surrounding the city; about the pressure on agricultural areas and urban agroecology.
phot. Aleksandra Mleczko
Zawady. A walk around Wilanów
Guide: Justyna Orchowska, PhD – sociologist, assistant professor at the University of Warsaw’s EUROREG Centre for European Regional and Local Studies. Her research interests include urban sociology and sociology of housing. Author and co-author of academic and expert publications, including Białe plamy. Mieszkańcy Warszawy o usługach publicznych [White Spots: Warsaw Residents on Public Services], Scholar, 2022. Since 2014, member of the Miasto jest Nasze [The City is Ours] Association.
Wilanów is a place where processes characteristic of contemporary Warsaw – especially its dynamically changing peripheral districts – converge. Simultaneously, it is a unique space due to the presence of a former royal residence. For centuries, the history of Wilanów was intertwined with the history of the palace, and the surrounding villages served as a food supply base for the court. As late as 1951, when Wilanów was incorporated into Warsaw proper, it was a rural commune with the highest percentage of people in the city living off farming and forestry. The first changes came in the 1970s, but the area’s almost complete urbanisation did not take place until after 1989, during the period of political and economic transformation. Today, Wilanów is a place of contrasts. On the one hand, there are areas such as Zawady, Kępa Zawadowska, and further away, Powsinek and Powsin, where remnants of the rural landscape and a strong local identity are still present. On the other, there is Miasteczko Wilanów, designed from scratch, with new residents, mostly middle-class. There are tensions between these worlds: linguistic, social, and symbolic. Older inhabitants may refer to the newcomers as “buraki” [beetroots, beets], a reference to the crop formerly grown in these areas, now replaced by apartment buildings. These local conflicts reflect the deeper changes that have taken place in Warsaw since 1989 – class transformations, spatial changes, and a new understanding of urban identity.
phot. Artur Wosz
The most far-out block in Warsaw. A walk around Bródno
Guide: Agnieszka Rasmus-Zgorzelska – graduate of English studies, where she became interested in, among other things, the theory of translation as intercultural communication, and postgraduate studies in urban planning. Co-founder and head of the Architecture Centre Foundation, curator, publisher, editor, journalist, and translator. She runs publishing projects, curates artistic and educational events related to the popularisation of knowledge about architecture, and she builds bridges between art disciplines as well as between the worlds of professionals and amateurs.
There is a place in the right-bank Warsaw where you can still eat mirabelle plums [cherry plums, popularly known is Poland as mirabelles – translators’ note] straight from the tree, smell manure, and hear a rooster crow. But traces of the countryside in Bródno are not always so easy to find. Some can be read from the layout of the streets, others are only visible in photographs, and still others are hidden only in memories. Agnieszka Rasmus, who lived in what was the most far-out block of flats in Warsaw for half of her life, will guide you around the outskirts of the former Bródno district, which today is known as Targówek.
phot. Aleksandra Mleczko
Village, health resort, linear city. A walk along a section of the Otwock Line in Radość
Guide: Łukasz Drozda, PhD – political scientist and urban planner, public policy specialist. His research focuses primarily on social conflicts surrounding urban policy, urban populism, and urbanisation processes in the former Eastern Bloc. He spent the first seventeen years of his life in Warsaw’s Radość district.
The Wawer district (or, as it is informally known, Linia Otwocka) is a collection of former health resorts located along two axes: the railway line to Lublin and Wał Miedzeszyński (the road to Puławy). The old-time character of this area is gradually disappearing, but it remains an unusual example of a capital city suburb, illustrating the implementation of a classic, though rare in Poland, urban planning concept. The walk, which aims to show the diversity of urban development forms in this area – from the traces of traditional villages, still visible in some places, to the most contemporary layers of local urbanisation – will be led by a long-time local resident.
phot. Aleksandra Mleczko
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Warsaw’s villages: the past and the future
The conclusive meeting of The Villages of Warsaw 2025 began with a presentation of a map of selected Warsaw villages, with historical descriptions compiled by Jerzy Szałygin (Terpa Foundation for the Protection of Common Cultural Heritage, Association of Monument Conservators). Architect Jan Szeliga alongside sociologist and anthropologist Krzysztof Janas, authors of the Wieśland [Village-land] concept, examined designing of the future of rural areas. Urban planner Mikołaj Gomółka talked about the villages of Berlin and Hanoi he had researched and about the practical implications of his research for Warsaw.
Jerzy Szałygin: Mapping the Villages of Warsaw
How was the first map of the Warsaw villages within the present-day capital created? How was historical information collected about the villages, settlements, housing estates, and farms that had been incorporated into the city over the centuries? What are the possibilities for continuing these activities, including supplementing the descriptive labels with information on material, spiritual, and social culture, expanding the studies to include an analysis of rural layouts and their state of preservation in situ (in the 21st century), and formulating recommendations for city planners and authorities?
Fot. Aleksandra Mleczko
Krzysztof Janas, Jan Szeliga: Warsaw’s thatched roofs, or Wieśland five years later. On urban fantasies that have become everyday reality
In 2019, the title Wieśland, or an urban fantasy covered with thatch sounded like an architectural hallucination. It told the story of an amusement park in the centre of Warsaw, where residents could escape for a moment to a “perfect village” – without the mud and toil, but with a controlled experience of nature, silence, and idyll. Wieśland was a diagnosis in the field of architecture and cultural theory: a metaphor for hyper-consumption, the aestheticisation of nostalgia and the commodification of rurality. It also posed questions about the condition of an urban society longing for a countryside it had invented for itself. Recipient of the main prize in the 2020 THEORY competition organized by the Stefan Kuryłowicz Foundation, Wieśland was published as a bilingual, richly illustrated publication.
Five years later, in a post-pandemic world, in the shadow of warfare and in the era of technological acceleration, the questions raised in Wieśland take on a new meaning. If in 2019 it was all about a hyper-village enclosed in the structure of an urban Disneyland, then today – in the era of remote work, consumption driven by the steroids of artificial intelligence, and growing prosperity which finds its outlet in increasingly sophisticated wellness services – we are witnessing a proliferation of Wieślands. The idea has become dispersed, multiplied, and customised. Wieśland is no longer just a spectacle for the masses. It is a catalogue of experiences tailored to the wallet of each market segment. From short-term stays at rural micro-houses available via Slowhop, to plots of land covered with inflatable pools in allotment gardens and “workshop” weekends in the countryside, to corporate team-building trips where you can milk cows. Rustic studios, premium glamping agritourism, weddings and catered events in barns – all this makes up the landscape of pop-up Wieślands, even more organised, commercialised, and available on demand 24/7.
The presentation will show what has come true from the 2019 diagnosis, but also what has changed. Are Wieślands of today an expression of departure from the theme of rurality, or their further fetishisation? Are we dealing with deconstruction of the urban dream of the countryside, or an even more individualised version of it? And, paradoxically, has Wieśland, as a dystopian fantasy, turned out to be quite an accurate commentary on contemporary relations between space, identity, and consumption?
Mikołaj Gomółka: The sacred tree and the tear – the countryside in the city, as exemplified by Hanoi and Berlin
Cities and villages are often presented as opposites. Indeed, for hundreds of years, cities had clear boundaries in space, and their dense spatial structure contrasted with the surrounding rural areas. The countryside fed the city, and in return the city produced the tools for it. But what happened when cities began to expand to such an extent that the surrounding villages were absorbed? Did it lead to the disappearance of the villages, or have their traces remained an important part of local identity to this day? Or perhaps the spatial structure of the countryside began to shape the urbanised areas of the surrounding farmland?
On the surface, Hanoi and Berlin seem poles apart. The German capital, regulated by urban planners for hundreds of years, appears – despite its polycentricity and historical complexities – to be a Western European, planned city. The capital of Vietnam, apart from its historic square-shaped citadel, seems to be an amorphous, chaotically created entity. However, when we look at how both cities have surrounded the absorbed villages with their structures, we may find that there are surprisingly numerous similarities.
The lecture will present the results of research conducted in Berlin in 2022, in collaboration with the Technical University of Berlin, and in Hanoi in 2025, in collaboration with the Hanoi Architectural University. The aim of the research was to map the remains of former villages in both metropolises, but also to attempt to establish to what extent a village can retain its character while becoming a part of a city, and how much the city can benefit from the identity of the village it is “swallowing” as it expands spatially in the process. The research is part of a doctoral thesis entitled “Entropic City – on the composition and decomposition of space”, developed at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology and the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning of the Technical University of Berlin. The next stage of the research will result in an inventory of former villages in Warsaw, and the methodology used in the study of Berlin and Hanoi will serve as the go-to research tool.
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The rural botanical history of Warsaw.
Between memory, projection, and contemporary nostalgia
Magdalena Krzosek, Aleksandra Litorowicz
Views of Mokotów near Warsaw (1882), a series of woodcuts by Edward Gorazdowski and Aleksander Gierymski, depicts the picturesque Mazovian countryside at the foot of a hill. We can see wooden houses with their outbuildings, surrounded by farmland and pastures, which bear no resemblance to the capital city district that this place will soon become. Cows are grazing peacefully in the village, the inhabitants are captured during field work, someone is preparing a wagon and horses for the road, someone else is drawing water from a well. Only the brickyards visible in the background herald the imminent development of dense, brick-and-mortar buildings. Soon, in 1916, Mokotów will be incorporated within the city limits of Warsaw.
Views of Mokotów near Warsaw
The views depicted in the woodcuts certainly do not give us a complete picture of the Warsaw countryside towards the end of the 19th century. Despite the accompanying description – “life study” – even Gierymski himself, the author of the sketches, winks at the viewer by placing in one of the prints a figure of an artist painting a cottage. This provokes the viewer to consider the extent to which the image they see has documentary value and to what extent its value is sentimental. Filtered through the artist’s eye, imagination and brushstrokes, the rural landscape contains a universal set of elements which (even today) we want to associate with bucolic countryside life. Well-spaced wooden buildings, wide roadsides, modest but tidy farmyards, well-fed livestock and people leisurely going about their work in the fields or on the farm. In the background, on a hill, there is a church. Next to each cottage grows a perfectly-proportioned tree – perhaps a small-leaved lime (Tilia cordata), known in folk culture as a protective species, or perhaps an English oak (Quercus robur) or common ash (Fraxinus excelsior). The soaring silhouette of a poplar tree (Populus sp.) is clearly recognisable. Some look more like fruit trees – apple, plum, or pear. Here and there, we can see tall shrubs – perhaps the then popular mock orange (Philadelphus coronarius), lilac (Syringa vulgaris), guelder rose (Viburnum opulus) or black elder (Sambucus nigra).
Let us treat this set as a starting point and add another image to it – A view of Saska Kępa 40 years ago, a drawing by an unknown author, which was published in one of the 1900 issues of Wędrowiec [Wanderer]. It is a typical press illustration from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, distributed in a periodical that served to inform the public about important or interesting places and events. The image shows Saska Kępa as an area covered with farmland, meadows, and copses. In the foreground, we see townspeople strolling and riding horses, and a peasant herding cattle. In the background, there is a wide avenue lined with trees, as well as fields, meadows, and pastures interspersed with strips of shrubs. The Vistula River can be seen in the background. The clumps of lush vegetation on the balks are particularly noteworthy: these are rare – even in non-urban areas – edge communities, i.e. thickets consisting of many species of native shrubs, such as hawthorn (Crataegus sp.), blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), dog rose (Rosa canina), hazel (Coryllus avellana), dogwood (Cornus sanguinea), European spindle (Euonymus europaeus) and buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica).
The title of the drawing suggests a retrospective view, referring to the 1860s, a point 40 years prior in time. The drawing documents the area in its transitional stage: the moment when the rural location, adjacent to city life and river transport, begins to slowly transform away from its rustic character. Showing a landscape already lost at that point in time, it conveys both nostalgia and projection. The composition of the drawing and the scaling of its elements is governed by emotion rather than any geometric visual order. Human figures are drawn very small and crowd the bottom of the illustration. They are entirely dominated by the centrally-positioned broad view of fields and meadows, with a river far in the distance. This is the melancholic perspective of someone who has observed the transformation and longs for the locale’s long-gone form. The perspective entails a certain epistemic naivety and idealisation, but is also emblematic, exemplifying as it does what we – even now – want to see and remember about the landscapes from before large-scale agriculture and intensive urban development.
The Views of Saska Kępa from 40 years ago
An even more arcadian representation of the rural origin of today’s east or right-bank Warsaw is offered by Z Saskiej Kępy [From the Saska Kępa], a drawing by Ciechomski and Antoszewicz published in the “Kłosy” [Ears of Corn] periodical in 1887. It shows four children gathered around a fire in the fields, after the harvest has been brought in, the season being late summer or early autumn. The small figures are surrounded by the vast Mazovia landscape, with its typical lines of roadside or midfield trees, and a gully, most likely with a brook running through it. The gully is bordered by the distinctive pollarded willow trees. Pollarding, or regular pruning of a tree’s upper branches, was for centuries a practice performed for both economic and aesthetic reasons. It allowed the growth of supple withies used to weave baskets, construct fences, and reinforce riverbanks, as well as for fuel. Systematic pruning gave pollarded willows their distinctive shape – a girthy trunk and a thick fan of new growth – that became one of the most recognisable elements of Mazovia’s rural and riparian landscape. Pollarding was most typically done on two willow species: the white willow (Salix alba) and the crack willow (Salix fragilis).
From the Saska Kępa
Pollarded willows have frequently been used in visual art and literature as a symbol of the connection between humans and nature, as well as of Mazovia’s traditional way of life. In landscape painting, watercolours, and illustrations or prints of all kinds, they function as shorthand for simplicity, homeliness, and the continuity of tradition. They also came to be seen as symbolic of (being rooted in) Polishness, with their regularly pruned heads corresponding to the seasonal rhythm of a life governed by nature and work. It is therefore no coincidence that these trees are the backdrop of a genre scene depicting the 19th-century Saska Kępa. Even today, they are part of collective imagination, functioning as a cultural code that permeates the imaginary of the Mazovia countryside.
Just like 19th-century illustrators or printmakers, we too construct narratives about the remains of rural landscapes, absorbed by the ever-expanding Warsaw. Some of them are indeed traces of the land’s farming past that remain legible and continue to provide material evidence of the area’s transition from farmland to part of a large urban organism. Others, however, are imaginary; they may be narrated in a historically-inflected language, but they are a new creation, modelled after the past as a sign of nostalgia for it. In particular, this is the case of plants and their histories, rooted in memories of the fields and village gardens in whose vicinity many generations of Varsovians grew up. Many of these plants were brought to Warsaw from whichever parts of Poland newcomers to the city arrived. Others – such as the garden cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus) – have become so familiar in the city that it appears as though they were native here. The garden cosmos, often associated with the specific aesthetics of flower and vegetable patches commonly adorning the wooden fences and cottages of Polish villages, is commonly known in the city as “the varsovian.” But interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, the plant is not native even to Europe: it was brought from Central America several centuries ago. It thus underwent a trans-oceanic journey, just like other species that have become inextricably connected in our imaginations to Poland’s rural landscapes: potatoes (Solanum tuberosum), maize (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus sp.), or sunflowers (Helianthus annuus). The Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) is another interesting example. It reached Poland in the 18th century as a food crop; today, as a plant that escaped from cultivation, it is considered an invasive plant. It is very common in Warsaw, growing at roadsides, empty plots, or overgrown meadows.
There are many species of trees, bushes, flowers, or other useful plants that continue to grow in the city and which we associate with Warsaw’s rural past. Yet they do not constitute material traces of that past, because their permanence, or continuity of existence, is less often a fact than a product of our interpretative activity based on cultural imagination. Warsaw’s urban and suburban lands have undergone substantial change over the last decades, and the erasure of any remaining traces of past structures or layout of the neighbourhoods has never been more intense. That erasure has been followed by the disappearance of mid-field trees, former gardens and fruit orchards. Intensive residential development, residential neighbourhoods spilling over into the suburbs, and building on agricultural land has had consequences. Unploughed baulks on field borders, with their typical edge ecosystems, as well as clusters of weeds once growing by peasant crofts, were pushed out of the capital, and with them, plants such as stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), ground-ivy (Glechoma hederacea), bugleweed (Ajuga reptans), burdock (Arctium sp.) or lesser celandine (Ficaria verna). They were replaced with new species, varieties propagated in plant nurseries, or vast lawns. Where new planting proceeded more slowly, the space was claimed by synanthrope species, or those that flourish in places transformed by humans. Species such as the cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), the camomile (Chamomilla recutita), or the common corncockle – once primarily farm weeds, or segetal plants in specialised taxonomy – were supplanted by their ruderal successors, or species that thrive on roadsides, near railway tracks, on slag heaps, or in construction sites; examples include the Artemisia family (Arthemisia sp., comprising mugwort, wormwood, or sagebrush among others), fleabanes (Erigeron sp.), or goldenrods (Solidago sp.). But segetal plants are increasingly returning to the city as part of purpose-planted floral meadows; the streets of Warsaw are therefore slowly beginning to resemble the long-gone roads of Mazovia in the plant life that surrounds them.
The urban tissue of the capital, in particular of its peripheral districts, the (Hufendorf) layout typical of former villages is reflected in that of the residential neighbourhoods. Plot boundaries run along the borders of fields or wooded areas; in places where municipalities are slow to construct roads, we might find remnants of forest roads or dirt tracks, marked with a shrine or a cross. Here and there, entire clusters of farm buildings survive (such as the former State Agricultural Farm complex in Bródno), extant reminders of the agrarian past lives of today’s residential neighbourhoods. Features like these, often almost unnoticeable, reveal history’s turning points, helping us better understand the process through which a cluster of rural settlements, typified by an instrumental attitude towards land, morphed into an urban conglomerate in which greenery is governed by regimented maintenance and formation; it is no longer a purely functional, productive element of the environment, but a decorative one.
And yet, Warsaw is still overcome with a nostalgia for the verdant and the bucolic; the city’s residents strive to introduce rustic elements to city gardens, to courtyards of townhouses, the spaces between blocks of flats, to parks and city squares. Pumpkins and sunflowers make their appearance, as do herbs and medicinal plants such as mint (Mentha sp.), lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), southernwood (Artemisia abrotanum), lovage (Levisticum officinale), common rue (Ruta graveolens), common wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), or pot marigold (Calendula officinalis). You can also spot mallows (Malva sp.), hoary stock (Matthiola incana), sweet peas (Lathyrus odoratus), and nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus). Species typical of front gardens in villages are included into urban flowerbeds, which increasingly feature various delphiniums (Delphinium sp.), bearded irises (Iris x germanica), snapdragons (Antirrhinum majus), the common stock (Matthiola sp.), black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia sp.), dahlias (Dahlia sp.), peonies (Paeonia sp.), or garden phloxes (Phlox paniculata).
The desire to restore the productive function of urban plants has found its expression in community gardens. They are grounded in the unique relation countryside dwellers had to land as a resource used to produce food. Urban gardeners plant vegetables, fruit, and herbs, and harvest them together at the end of the season. This aspect of village life was the point of reference for the harvest festival of Warsaw’s community gardens, held every year between 2017 and 2021. Other examples include the festival of Pumpkin Slaughter – a yearly event celebrating the harvest in the Motyka i Słońce community garden in the Jazdów neighbourhood, or the neighbourly harvest feast in the Wild Garden looked after by the “Świt” Cultural Centre in Bródno.
One element of Warsaw’s landscape that is frequently associated with country life is its fruit trees. Walking and exploring the city, aficionados of Warsaw’s local history find them excellent starting points for stories of the big city’s rural past. Even a single fruit tree can become a landmark that takes us back to a time when, instead of blocks of flats, the landscape that stretched into the distance was dotted with peasant cottages and farms. In fact, however, most fruit trees from the pre-war orchards of Warsaw or the nearby villages have not survived. They were destroyed during the war, chopped down for fuel, or cut down to make room for construction. Many died of old age and were removed by urban green management. As estimated by Professor Szczepan Pieniążek, long-time head of the Horticulture Institute in Skierniewice and one of the most eminent propagators of pomology in Poland, “On average […] apple and pear trees live for 40-50 years in our orchards; cherries, true cherries and plums some 30-40 years; apricot and peach trees 15-25 years.” Truly ancient specimens of fruit trees are therefore very unusual. The Central Register of Nature Conservation Forms has only five fruit trees among the four hundred that have been given the status of Monument Trees, awarded for environmental, historic, or cultural reasons. All four are pear trees (Pyrus communis). Individual trees do remain that still remember Warsaw’s rural landscape; they can be found in city parks and green areas, such as those of Bródno and Służew. But these date back to the times of the Polish People’s Republic rather than the days when the villages were not yet part of Warsaw.
Horticulture, especially pomology, has a special connection to Warsaw. Between the streets of Emilii Plater and Tytusa Chałubińskiego, the very centre of today, is the site of the former Pomological Garden. Operating from the late 19th century up until World War II, the garden – a centre specialising in propagating and acclimatising fruit trees – was an important source of planting stock not only for the villages of Mazovia, but the entire country. Another renowned nursery of fruit trees and other plants was run by the Ulrich family. In this way, Warsaw was physically built (and so shaped) on former farmland, but the city in turn also had an impact on what species and varieties were grown in the orchards and gardens in the countryside.
Although the fruit trees dating back to that time are no longer substantially present in the urban tissue, knowledge has survived of the cultivars popularly grown at the time. Thanks to various scientific and social initiatives, these old cultivars are again planted in urban spaces. Material continuity may have been broken, but symbolic continuity has been preserved, and can be seen in specific activities that transform urban green areas from purely recreational to potentially useful in a productive sense. An example is the community orchard in Wilanów, established a few years ago after a district resident applied for a grant to that effect within the Civic Budget. The orchard is located in a small vacant lot nearby the Hetman Jan Zamoyski Primary School no. 358; it has fruit trees as well as currant, gooseberry, and raspberry plants.
Community orchard in Wilanów
Also in Wilanów, on the initiative of journalist Katarzyna Bosacka, recovering old apple tree cultivars has taken on a celebratory dimension. The project involved planting 100 trees of old varieties to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Poland’s regained independence. With the involvement of the district, since 2018 the trees have been planted in kindergartens and schools, among other places. In the future, it will be possible to pick kosztela (Malus domestica Kosztela), papierówka, antonówka, raspberry oberland (Pol. malinówka), and gravenstein apples from them, which are an alternative to the varieties currently used in commercial apple production. The project has the potential to become a long-term activity, bringing together multi-generational groups of residents who are building a new element of the district’s identity, rooted in local history. Fruit trees are planted in Wilanów on various occasions (e.g. to commemorate the adoption of the Constitution of 3 May 1791 or during Wilanów Days) and have even become part of political campaigns.
There is a growing amount of educational and research activity around the return to planting old varieties of fruit trees. Among others, the Lower Vistula Friends Society (Pol. Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dolnej Wisły) is involved in this. Their work concerns not only horticultural aspects (cultivation, care and maintenance, learning about taste qualities), but also often the history of the place where horticulture is carried out. Numerous local initiatives benefit from the knowledge gathered as a result. A case in point being a workshop organised in autumn 2024 by the Urzecze Gender Inclusive Farmers Association (Pol. “Grymle z Urzecza” – Koło Gospodyń i Gospodarzy Wiejskich). During the event, in addition to imparting practical gardening knowledge, participants were encouraged to plant traditional cultivars of apple and pear trees, not only for their practical quality, but also for their sentimental value, which refers our collective imagination to childhood landscapes and flavours. It is worth remembering that Urzecze is one of the formative ethnographic micro-regions as far as Warsaw’s rural identity is concerned. Stretched across the Middle Vistula Valley from the mouths of the Pilica and Wilga rivers in the south to Siekierki and Saska Kępa in the north, the region was once replete with orchards supplying the capital with apples, pears, Vistula cherries, and other seasonal fruits. It has been the subject of many studies and events in the field of natural and cultural education in recent years, thanks to which the region has been restored to the collective memory.
References to the presence of fruit trees in the history and space of Warsaw can also be found in the layout of the Sady Żoliborskie housing estate, built on the basis of a design by Halina Skibniewska between 1958 and 1972 by the Warsaw Housing Cooperative. It is an example of post-war development in which residential architecture was incorporated into the landscape of the former farmland. Skibniewska decided to preserve the fruit trees growing there and show that greenery between blocks of flats can have practical value. The architect justified her design decisions as follows: “If, at the same time, we build a house and plant a tree on a housing estate, then a resident has to wait twenty-five or thirty years for the tree to grow. I know that I have to preserve everything that grows [in the area], because this will allow me to more quickly create a real living environment populated by trees. […] When I saved the apple trees in Sady, rickety ones to boot, everyone thought I was a deranged romantic. However, it was not romanticism at all, but rather hard rationalism and calculation. The orchards are rustling with trees [now], and after fifteen years, the young linden trees are still child-like.”
After several decades, the trees – so carefully preserved by Skibniewska – fell into oblivion. It is only recently that local activists and residents associated with Żoliborz Fruit Orchards [Pol. Owocowe Sady Żoliborskie], a local neighbourhood initiative, have begun fighting to preserve the fruit-growing character of the area and ensure that the greenery continues to be maintained and cared for in the form of orchards. They use a variety of tools to achieve this: they organise meetings and joint fruit picking; they have also commissioned an expert inventory of trees and initiated artistic campaigns. However, the group faces many challenges in the actions it undertakes: they necessitate voluntary commitment and sometimes become the subject of disputes over the development of urban greenery, as some residents complain that falling fruit is unsightly, dirty and even makes it difficult to make use of the area. The Żoliborz Orchards community is therefore an example of a place where rural and urban characteristics not only intertwine, but also clash. One can justifiably claim that in order for these two worlds to continue to coexist in the capital, they require constant involvement of the community and land managers, as well as negotiations on the rules for their use and maintenance.
The initiatives described above are part of a broader trend of “rural life nostalgia”, associated with the need to return to one’s roots and to live in harmony with nature’s vegetative cycle. It combines historical memory and local identity with practical aspects of ecology and education. It also shows that preserving and recreating old-time elements of the rural landscape in urban areas is no mean feat, but it can serve multiple functions – from cultural (e.g. bolstering local identity) to social (e.g. recreation, education) and environmental. This trend is also important due to the changing perception of the function of urban greenery and to the on-going restoration of its practical aspects. Establishment of orchards, vegetable gardens, and herb beds, which allow for the practical use of their harvests, constitutes a new model of urban everyday life – one that is focused on community and awareness of the potential food resources of urban areas.
Fruit trees in Dolinka Służewiecka and under Cwill Hill
Magdalena Krzosek – designer and researcher of environmental histories, urban gardener. Specialises in green space maintenance, implementation of activities in public spaces, and cooperation with cultural institutions and NGOs. As part of Puszka Foundation, she co-creates Miastozdziczenie.pl, an exploration of interspecies cohabitation, and the Social Archive of Warsaw Nature (Pol. Społeczne Archiwum Warszawskiej Przyrody). Author of publications, lectures, and workshops on the relationship between nature, people, and the city. In cooperation with the Culture Office of the Capital City of Warsaw, she prepared “Culture for Nature” (Pol. Kultura dla Natury, 2023), a report devoted to nature education in the capital’s cultural sector. Runs Mikroklimaty, her own design studio (mikroklimaty.com/).
Aleksandra Litorowicz – president of Puszka Foundation, cultural studies researcher, academic, and curator. Lecturer at the School of Form and the School of Ideas at SWPS University. Creator of FUTUWAWA, a competition for the Warsaw of the future, and of research and educational projects related to the city and art in public spaces. Co-founder of the School of Community Architecture (Pol. Szkoła Architektury Społeczności). Head of a nationwide study of monumental painting and of “Squares of Warsaw (to be salvaged)”, a research project. Creator of the Miastozdziczenie.pl initiative, which explores interspecies cohabitation. Originator and editor of Atlas of All Residents (Pol. Atlas wszystkich mieszkańców), a book describing human and non-human relations in Warsaw available in Polish at atlas.miastozdziczenie.pl/.