Warsaw

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WARSAW

Warsaw first rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, when Poland and Lithuania joined to form a united republic. Because the city is located conveniently between the two capitals of Cracow (Kraków) and Vilnius, and along the Vistula River leading to the major port city of Gda?sk, it was used for meetings of the Sejm (parliament) from 1569, and as a royal residence from 1596. During the next two centuries Warsaw was repeatedly damaged by warfare and political turmoil, and the city's economy was severely crippled. When Poland was conquered and partitioned in 1795, Warsaw was relegated to the status of a provincial town within the Kingdom of Prussia. The population of the city fell in a few short years from a pre-partition size of 150,000 to a mere 60,000 inhabitants.

Napoleon fashioned a puppet state called the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807, thus returning a bit of the city's former importance. Although the duchy fell with its founder, Warsaw remained a capital after 1815 when the Congress of Vienna sponsored the creation of the "Kingdom of Poland" as a semiautonomous state linked to the Russian Empire by a common hereditary ruler. The tsars steadily eroded the self-rule of the kingdom, but Warsaw retained its role as an administrative center. Above all, though, it was the focal point of the Polish national movement: Warsaw was the primary site for political agitation and public demonstrations, and it was the launching point for major uprisings in 1830 and 1863. Because of Warsaw's symbolic importance, national independence is traditionally dated from the moment the city came under Polish authority on 11 November 1918.

After Warsaw was linked to the major regional capitals by raillines(Vienna from 1848, St. Petersburg from 1862), it developed rapidly into a major industrial and commercial center. Already in 1880 Warsaw had nearly 400,000 people, and by 1910 it had 750,000, making it the third-largest city in the Russian Empire and one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe. It continued to expand after the restoration of Polish independence, exceeding one million people by 1925. Warsaw's urban infrastructure and architecture grew apace with this population growth: a modern sewage system was installed in 1872, gas lines were laid in 1856, the first tram line (horse-drawn) began service in 1866, a telephone system was in place from 1881, and electric power was available from 1903.

Most of Warsaw's inhabitants in the nineteenth century were Polish-speaking Roman Catholics, but Jews made up more than one-third of the population. Assimilation was limited, but certainly more common in Warsaw than in the countryside (the city's main synagogue featured sermons in Polish from the 1850s onward). An influx of rural Jews at the end of the century increased the dominance of the Yiddish-speaking population. There were also about forty thousand Russian soldiers stationed in and around Warsaw at the start of the twentieth century.

Even during the era of the partitions, Warsaw continued to be a focal point for Polish cultural, intellectual, and artistic life. The city's vibrant theatrical scene featured the National Theater Company, which was founded in 1765 and housed from 1833 in a magnificent opera house known as the Wielki Teatr (Great Theater). Warsaw's first major public art museum was created in 1862 and renamed the National Museum in 1916. The University of Warsaw was founded in 1816, but it had a troubled history: between 1831 and 1862 it was closed because the tsarist authorities feared student unrest, and between 1869 and 1915 Russian was the exclusive language of instruction. Nonetheless, the university produced many of the greatest intellectual and cultural figures of the era, including most of the so-callled Warsaw positivists (a late-nineteenth-entury political and literary movement defined by a liberal worldview and a naturalistic style). Though unable to serve as a center of political authority in the nineteenth century, Warsaw remained the symbolic capital of the country for many cultural and intellectual purposes.