Royal Castle, Warsaw

Stand at the edge of Castle Square and feel the ground change under your feet. Smooth paving gives way to old cobbles, worn uneven by centuries of carriages and crowds. Ahead of you rises a long facade in warm, brick-red plaster. Above it climbs a slim clock tower with a green copper spire. Pigeons circle the column at the centre of the square. Somewhere a street musician is tuning up. This is the Royal Castle of Warsaw... and almost nothing you see is as old as it looks.

That is the first surprise, and it is the heart of this place. The building in front of you is a reconstruction. It was finished in the late twentieth century, after the original was burned and then blown apart during the Second World War. And yet it does not feel like a copy. It feels lived in. To understand why, we need to go back to the beginning — to a small riverside fortress on a bluff above the Vistula.

In the Middle Ages, this spot belonged to the dukes of Mazovia, a regional duchy in central Poland. Their stronghold watched over the river crossing below. Warsaw was then a modest trading town. The real capital of the Polish kingdom was Kraków, far to the south. That changed at the end of the sixteenth century. King Sigismund the Third, of the Swedish Vasa dynasty, moved his court here. Warsaw sat closer to the centre of a huge union of Poland and Lithuania. The castle had to grow to match its new role.

Look now at the column in the middle of the square. The bronze figure on top is Sigismund himself. He holds a cross in one hand and a sabre in the other. His son, King Władysław the Fourth, raised this monument in 1644. Locals have used it as a meeting point for generations. If you hear someone say they will meet a friend "under the column", this is the place they mean. It is one of the oldest secular monuments of its kind in northern Europe.

Now turn back to the castle and walk towards the courtyard. Here is the second surprise. The building is not a simple rectangle. Its wings wrap around a five-sided courtyard, a shape you only notice from inside. The plan grew over time, wing by wing, as kings added rooms and towers. Stand in the middle and turn slowly. The walls lean towards you from different angles. It is a quiet, enclosed space, and the noise of the square drops away almost at once.

In the eighteenth century, the castle reached its high point of elegance. The last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski, was a passionate patron of the arts. He brought painters, architects and craftsmen to Warsaw. Under him, the state rooms filled with marble, gilded stucco and painted ceilings. He collected paintings, sculptures and books. He wanted this palace to show a modern, cultured kingdom. The grandest interiors you will walk through today follow his taste.

This was also a political building, not only a royal home. The Polish parliament met here. And on the third of May, 1791, the castle saw one of the great moments in the country's history. A new constitution was adopted here. It was the first modern written constitution in Europe, and the second in the world after the American one. It tried to reform a weak state. Within a few years, neighbouring powers had divided Poland between them, and the kingdom disappeared from the map.

One room inside matters more than most. It is often called the Canaletto Room. It holds a series of views of Warsaw painted by Bernardo Bellotto. He was a Venetian artist and the nephew of the famous Canaletto, whose name he also used. Bellotto painted the streets, churches and squares of eighteenth-century Warsaw with remarkable precision. Remember those paintings. They will become important later in this story, in a way the artist could never have imagined.

In September 1939, German forces besieged Warsaw. Shells set the castle roof on fire. Look up at the clock tower. Its clock stopped at a quarter past eleven, when the building was hit. While the fire burned, museum staff and local residents ran inside. They carried out paintings, furniture and fragments of decoration. Some even removed pieces of panelling and stucco from the walls. Many of these objects were hidden through the war. Today they are back in the rooms they came from.

Worse came in 1944. After the Warsaw Uprising failed, German troops destroyed the city on purpose, street by street. Engineers drilled holes in the castle walls and filled them with explosives. By the end of the war, only fragments of the building were left. For many years after, the site stood as a ruin. Rebuilding it was a political question as much as a practical one. Work finally began in the early 1970s.

Here is where those Bellotto paintings return. His detailed views helped architects rebuild the Old Town and the castle. They studied his facades, rooflines and colours alongside old drawings and photographs. Much of the money for the castle came from ordinary people. Poles at home and abroad sent donations, large and small. The clock in the tower was restarted in 1974, set at the same hour it had stopped. Today the castle and the surrounding Old Town are listed by UNESCO as an example of near-total reconstruction.

Inside, you can walk through the royal apartments, the great ballroom and the rooms of parliament. Look for the fragments that survived. In some places, original carvings and pieces of stucco sit beside new work. The difference is often hard to see. The collection also includes two paintings by Rembrandt, donated to the castle in the 1990s. Take your time in the quieter rooms. They often hold the most personal stories of the building.

Before you leave, walk around to the river side of the castle. There, the land drops towards the Vistula. Below the castle runs a long row of arches, with gardens beyond. From here the building looks calmer, less formal, almost domestic. Now look back at the square, the column and the red facade. Everything here was lost once, and everything here was chosen again. As you walk away across the cobbles, listen for the clock in the tower. It still keeps time.