Warsaw stadium adds new threat to historic area
Baku, June 11 (AZERTAC). The aerial view made from a hot air balloon shows the new National Stadium, ready for the Euro 2012 football games, in Warsaw, Poland on Friday, May 18, 2012. The stadium is located in one of Warsaw's most popular neighborhoods: Saska Kepa, an enclave of towering trees and homes built in the modernist style of the 1920s and 1930s. The Euro 2012 soccer championship kicks off Friday, June 8, 2012.
The National Stadium in Poland, built for the 2012 European Championship, rises in the shape of a wicker basket over one of Warsaw's most popular neighborhoods: Saska Kepa, an enclave of towering trees and architectural gems dating back to the 1920s.
To some, the colossal stadium - with a retractable fiberglass roof and a shimmery red-and-white facade in the colors of the national flag - is a source of pride, a symbol of a capitalist surge that has remade the country since it threw off communism in 1989.
To others, the 58,000-seat arena is an eyesore and the latest affront to a unique neighborhood already threatened by a rising class of entrepreneurs and developers. Proof, if any more was needed, of how breakneck economic growth can jeopardize a vulnerable architectural heritage.
Any change to historic areas in Warsaw provokes strong emotions because of how little survived World War II. Saska Kepa, an exclusive area before the war that was home to doctors and lawyers and other upper middle-class professionals, has the unique distinction of being the city's only prestigious neighborhood to survive in its entirety.
Capitalism hasn't been kind either. A spectacular modernist villa built in 1929 was torn down to widen a road. A square, Plac Przymierza, disappeared under a complex of apartments and shops that dwarf surrounding homes. Now developers are busy dismantling or radically restructuring prewar homes to build much larger structures - changes that erode their historic look and swallow up leafy plots that long gave the area a distinctive garden city feel.
Saska Kepa - where maple, ash and linden trees give shade to prewar homes and trendy restaurants - has the unusual distinction of surviving the war in its entirety because of its location on the eastern bank of the Vistula River, where Soviet troops sat idly during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the occupying German forces. Polish insurgents hoped for the support of the Red Army, which by that time had made it to Warsaw in its westward push that defeated Hitler. But Soviet leader Joseph Stalin preferred to let the Germans destroy the city and its people, knowing they would have also become a democratic opposition to Moscow's postwar domination.
Hitler's forces, in retribution for the revolt, razed most of the city to the ground. During the decades of Soviet control that followed, the capital was rebuilt in a gray and heavy Stalinist style that is still predominant. Over the past two decades the city has been transformed again by glass-skinned skyscrapers.
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