I’ve written about the Royal Castle in Warsaw before, but this is what it looked like in around the 1850s.
And this is what it looks like now. There are some changes that are evident if counting the number of windows, but this remains an impressive rebuilding of a structure as it was entirely demolished by the Germans during the Second World War. Well, other than a couple of small sections of walls, but otherwise the destruction was complete.
There’s one hero in all this, namely Stanisław Lorentz (1899-1991) who was a museum official who was able to take numerous exhibits to save them, including from the Royal Castle. He continued to rebuild the museum service in Poland after the end of the Second World War and he was later involved with the committee that rebuilt the structure between 1971 and 1984. There must have been something very satisfying about being able to watch the rebuilding of not just the rebuilding, but also galleries and museums across the city.