The emotional heartbeat of the city

The rebuilding of the Saxon Palace [Pałac Saski] is a project that has been tabled and dropped many times. After the war, Stalin envisioned Warsaw as a new city devoid of capitalist architecture and populated by resettled people forcibly detached from their 19th-century roots. The communist authorities were against reconstructing a building that during the twenty-year interwar period had played such a central role in the formation of Polish national identity. After Poland regained its independence in 1918, the Saxon Palace was home to the General Staff of the Polish National Army. It was here that Jan Kowalewski cracked the Bolshevik codes in 1920 and Polish mathematicians did the same for the German Enigma code in the run-up to World War II. During the interwar period, enthusiastic celebrations took place on pl. Piłsudskiego following the restoration of national sovereignty. This was the beating heart of the city. But the reconstruction of buildings so steeped in Polish patriotism h