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A City Rebuilt from Paintings, to How It Looked in 1780

More than 85% of Warsaw's historic centre was destroyed in the Second World War, most of it deliberately after the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. Across the city as a whole, more than 90% of buildings were damaged or destroyed. The Royal Castle was gone. The Old Town was rubble.

When Poland decided to rebuild the historic centre, it faced a question that had no obvious answer: rebuild it as what?

They chose not to reconstruct the city as it had stood in 1939. They reconstructed it as it had looked in its eighteenth-century golden age — roughly 160 years before the destruction.

They could do this because of one man's paintings.

Bernardo Bellotto, born in Venice in 1721 and nephew of Canaletto, served as court painter to Poland's last king from the late 1760s. Over about a decade he produced some twenty-two detailed panoramic views of Warsaw, working with a camera obscura, which gave his architectural detail near-photographic accuracy. The paintings survived the war.

After 1945 the Capital Reconstruction Bureau used them as working drawings, alongside architectural surveys hidden during the occupation and measurements taken in secret. Window shapes, rooflines and ornamental details were lifted from the canvases and turned into building specifications. The plaster colours on the burgher houses of the Old Town Market Place were matched to the pigments Bellotto had used.

The Old Town was substantially rebuilt within about eight years; work continued into the mid-1960s. Critics at the time said the result was a fake. The chief conservator, Jan Zachwatowicz, argued they were restoring the spiritual truth of the city.

In 1980, UNESCO added Warsaw's Old Town to the World Heritage List — breaking its own policy of excluding reconstructions, and the only complete urban reconstruction ever given that status. Bellotto's paintings now hang in the Royal Castle, which was itself rebuilt from them.

The clock: so Warsaw is a city that deliberately set itself back about a century and a half, and it also runs slightly behind in a more literal sense.

Poland uses Central European Time, calculated for the 15th meridian east. Warsaw sits at 21° east — six degrees on the wrong side of it.

That leaves Warsaw's clock roughly 24 minutes behind its own solar noon, one of the few cities on this site where the sun is ahead of the clock rather than the other way round.

A city walking through a three-dimensional projection of an eighteenth-century painting, on a clock that the sun beats to noon every day.

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