Krasiński Garden in Warsaw — a Baroque garden public since 1768

A garden behind a voivode's palace

The garden was laid out in 1676 as the Baroque grounds of the palace that Jan Dobrogost Krasiński, voivode of Płock, built between 1677 and 1695. The palace was designed by the Dutch architect Tylman van Gameren, with sculpture on the pediments by Andreas Schlüter, who later worked for the court in Berlin. At the start the garden covered barely three and a half hectares.

The palace closes the garden on the east, towards Krasiński Square: its main front faces the square, its garden front the park. It now holds an exhibition of the greatest treasures of the National Library, which took the building over in 1958 and, after years of restoration, opened it to visitors on 21 May 2024.

Open to everyone from 1768

On 5 December 1765 the Polish state bought the palace and garden as the seat of the Crown Treasury Commission. Three years later, on 1 April 1768, the garden was opened to the public — an unusually early decision by European standards, two generations before the wave of municipal parks of the nineteenth century.

For almost a century the neighbourhood was shaped by the theatre: the National Theatre stood beside the palace from 1790 to 1883. In 1824 an establishment for artificial mineral waters opened in the nearby Dückert palace, where a cure could be taken without travelling to a spa town. Until the Saxon Garden was created, this was the largest Baroque park in Warsaw.

Szanior turns Baroque into landscape

The layout you walk today was created between 1891 and 1895 by Franciszek Szanior, the city's chief gardener, who replaced the formal Baroque parterres with an English landscape park of winding paths, irregular groups of trees and deliberately framed views.

The pond with its artificial cascade dates from the same works and holds a sculpture by Leon Machowski: five fishermen in a boat with a large fish. Szanior's planting left behind species that are still uncommon in Warsaw — ginkgo, black walnut, Turkish hazel and Caucasian wingnut. In the early twenty-first century between twenty-seven and twenty-nine bird species were recorded nesting here in summer.

Two wars at the garden's edge

On the evening of 29 November 1830, the first day of the November Uprising, insurgents won a skirmish against a Russian regiment at the western edge of the garden and went on to capture the nearby Royal Arsenal and its weapons. A memorial boulder marks the spot.

Under the German occupation the garden lay just outside the boundary of the Warsaw Ghetto, which ran along Świętojerska street; markers set into the pavement near Andersa and Świętojerska now trace that line. During the Warsaw Uprising the park became a battlefield: the Chrobry I battalion built a redoubt in the ruins of Simons Passage, blocking the German approach to the Old Town. On 31 August 1944 the Luftwaffe bombed the building; more than two hundred people died, a hundred and twenty of them insurgents.

After the war the garden grew to its present 11.8 hectares by absorbing the plots of destroyed tenements. In 2013 and 2014 archaeologists dug in the northern part looking for the hidden archive of the Bund. The archive was not found, but they uncovered the cellars of the houses on Świętojerska, everyday objects and human bones.

What to look for

• The Baroque gate on Stare Nalewki — with a stretch of railing, the only surviving element of the original layout; restored in 2012
• The pond and its fishermen — in the western, landscaped half of the garden
• Chrobry I battalion monument — unveiled in 1989, by Jerzy Pietras, on the site of the northern Simons Passage building
• Monte Cassino monument — from 1999, by Gustaw Zemła and Wojciech Zabłocki, standing outside the railings
• Monument to the Women of the Warsaw Uprising — unveiled in 2021, by Monika Osiecka, on Krasiński Square
• Mayor Starzyński's bunker — built in the 1930s with eight rooms and walls over a metre thick; the mayor never used it, local residents did
• The Royal Arsenal — west of the park, now the State Archaeological Museum

The argument about the trees

In 2011 the city settled a competition for the garden's renewal and chose to restore the late nineteenth-century concept, in other words to go back to Szanior. Carrying it out produced one of Warsaw's loudest disputes over trees: at the end of 2012, 337 trees were felled, about a third of the stock.

The contractors and managers said most had been taken out for reasons of health and the rest for the sake of the composition; protesters thought the cutting went too far, and the press reported that some work had proceeded without archaeological survey despite the recommendations of heritage services. In 2014 close to a hundred new trees and over ten thousand shrubs were planted. The works also turned up brickwork, probably remains of the Badeni palace.

The garden has been protected since 1 July 1965, listed together with the gate on Nalewki street as part of the Krasiński Palace complex.

Getting there

• By metro — Ratusz Arsenał station, exit towards the Arsenal, then a few minutes on foot
• By tram — stops along Andersa and Długa streets, on the northern and southern edges of the garden
• On foot from the Old Town — west along Długa from the Barbican, under ten minutes
• Nearby — the Krasiński Palace with the National Library exhibition, the Arsenal with its archaeological museum, and the Muranów district with its ghetto memorials

Before you go

The garden is free and open on all four sides, which makes it a natural stage on a walk from the Old Town towards Muranów. Three quarters of an hour is enough for a loop; the paths are surfaced and mostly level, and the pond and playground draw the biggest crowds.

Come with history in mind. Within less than twelve hectares four layers overlap here: a Baroque residential garden, a nineteenth-century city park, the ghetto boundary and a battlefield of the 1944 uprising. The memorials are scattered and some stand outside the railings, so they are easy to miss if you keep to the main path.

How to get there and practical info

Location

central Warsaw, between Świętojerska, Andersa, Stare Nalewki and Długa streets and Krasiński Square

Area

11.8 hectares; barely three and a half hectares originally

Laid out

1676, as the Baroque garden of the Krasiński Palace

Public since

1 April 1768

Highlights

the Baroque gate on Stare Nalewki, the pond with its fishermen sculpture, the Chrobry I battalion monument, rare trees from Szanior's planting

Protection

register of monuments since 1 July 1965, as part of the Krasiński Palace complex

Time needed

three quarters of an hour for the garden, half a day with the palace and the Arsenal

Access

free entry, surfaced and mostly level paths

Current hours and tickets

the park is open to all; works and temporary closures are announced by the Warsaw greenery authority, and the palace exhibition by the National Library

When to go