Warsaw

This is an enormous city; and, as if it had been struck by a neutron bomb, it is half empty. 2 million people on a territory larger than Paris (with 5 million). This is because, having been completely leveled by the Germans, it was rebuilt to a Stalinist, Russian, megalomaniac plan. Huge roads, as wide as Piazza San Marco is long, stand here for ordinary streets, planned big because the future was meant to be brilliant and tanks were intended to parade here six abreast. Commuting takes forever, and costs a fortune; walking from one building to the next, or across the street, takes forever, and challenges anyone who is not in top form.

Something else is Russian, too. The titanesque gigantism and shocking ugliness of public monuments. One of the worst must be Starzynski, in Plac Bankowy, though the enormous Slowacki across the Imperial-dimensioned Square, isn’t much better. In front of St Florians, in Praga, I saw yesterday ever so briefly before averting my gaze, there stands something that blinds the eye, some woman or another rushing in a gale of billowing bronze. And of course the monument they put up to the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, the ugliest, most shocking thing I have ever seen. And because this eye-horror was put up in good cause, there is no chance, ever, not a snowflake’s in hell, that it will be taken down.

I avoid the intersection altogether.

Poland, Poles like to say, is completely unlike Russia. Except the capital, of course, which is quite like it.