fbpx

Powązki Cemetery

Cmentarz Powązkowski, fot. Tomasz Nowak
The oldest and best-known Catholic cemetery in Warsaw, founded in 1790, designed by Dominik Merlini – the court architect of King Stanisław August Poniatowski. Since its establishment, a million people have been buried there, including many well-known and distinguished Poles. You will come across the graves of many eminent writers, artists, scholars, politicians, doctors, entrepreneurs and social activists. It was with them in mind that in the inter-war years the Avenue of the Deserved was created. The first to be buried there were the writer and Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont, legendary airmen Franciszek Żwirko and Stanisław Wigura, the world-famous opera singer Jan Kiepura and the poet and satirist Wojciech Młynarski. There is also the symbolic grave of Warsaw Mayor Stefan Starzyński, murdered by the Germans in the first months of the occupation. In the adjacent Catacombs you will discover the graves of once popular singers Irena Jarocka and Czesław Niemen, and the tombstones of Fryderyk Chopin’s parents, the poet Zbigniew Herbert, composer Witold Lutosławski, director Krzysztof Kieślowski, the World War II courier Jan Nowak Jeziorański and Righteous Among the Nations Irena Sendlerowa, who saved 2,500 Jewish children from extermination.
It’s best to visit the cemetery on All Souls’ Day. Poles come to the graves of their relatives that day, and the cemetery is lit up by thousands of candles.
Alongside Powązki there is the Military Cemetery, known as the resting place of Warsaw insurgents, as well as the cemeteries of other religions, of which the Jewish and the two Protestant were cemeteries for Warsaw’s townspeople.

ul. Powązkowska 14

See More:
Muzeum Fryderyka Chopina, fot. Filip Kwiatkowski
Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich Polin, fot. Filip Kwiatkowski
Centrum Interpretacji Zabytku, fot. m.st. Warszawa
Rynek Starego Miasta, Muzeum Warszawy, fot. Filip Kwiatkowski
X