OLD WARSAW

CAREFUL RESTORATION GIVES POLAND'S CAPITAL THE LOOK AND FEEL OF CENTURIES GONE BY

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 4, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

That's a shame. Warsaw is wonderful, I learned on a recent swing through Eastern Europe. Part of the trip was business; for the pleasure part, I linked up with a tour called ``Poland, The Baltic States, Finland and St. Petersburg,'' organized by the travel company Abercrombie & Kent. In Warsaw, I decided that the oft-made comparison with Prague is silly: The two are completely different cities. A more valid comparison, one Poles themselves make, is between Poland's current and former capitals, Warsaw and Krakow, which are supposed to be to each other as brash New York is to bookish Boston. I was surprised to find I liked Warsaw better, and even found it more beautiful.

Its picturesque ``medieval'' buildings are mainly new, though. The Nazis bombed the city nearly into oblivion: There's a 20-minute black-and-white film at the main Tourist Office in the Old Town that shows exquisite, centuries-old buildings being reduced to rubble. But Warsaw rebuilt -- with determination and an eye for historical accuracy. Aiding in that effort were people's memories, old photographs, and a series of Bernardo Bellotto paintings now ensconced in the Royal Castle in the Old Town. Thank goodness for Bellotto. The nephew of the much better-known painter Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, Bellotto, like his uncle, was a meticulous chronicler of picturesque cityscapes. From 1767 until his death in 1780, he was court painter to the Polish king, Stanislaus Poniatowski. Nearly two centuries later, all those brick-by-brick views helped to re-create a ruined city.

The marvel of the reconstruction is that it doesn't look like Disney, or even like Colonial Williamsburg. It looks, and feels, real and unchanged. Even the sgraffito decoration scratched into the facades of the buildings looks old.

One issue in restoration is which period of a building's history to bring back. Like most of the rest of Warsaw, the 14th-century Cathedral of St. John was blown up by the Nazis and rebuilt during the Soviet era. The cathedral's facade is now the severe, linear brick of the original, without the accretions of plaster and fresco the building acquired later on.

With its meandering streets opening onto spacious squares, the Old Town is an inviting place to walk. But be forewarned that on entering it you're likely to be assaulted by gypsy children who, according to my Polish guide, come from Romania for the summer tourist season. They swarm around you, demanding money. My guide insists that no one here is hungry, though, that begging is ``a lifestyle choice.''

Warsaw today is chic and prosperous-looking, especially along its main shopping street, Nowy Swiat, which has been rebuilt in its original 18th-century style. It looks like London's Piccadilly, but on a diminutive, almost doll-like scale that makes it friendlier. Nowy Swiat is crammed with the usual high-end international designer boutiques, but also with shops selling Polish wares, including crafts and antiques. It's also crammed with cafes. The one I chose for lunch, Blikle, has been in business since 1869, and is known for its pastries. During the communist era, the Blikle family managed to hold on to part of their business, and since the democratic elections of 1989, they've expanded in good capitalist style, opening several branches. The Nowy Swiat Blikle is fashionably decorated, with mahogany paneling and dark green fabrics that look like malachite. The food is a delight, light and fresh. No kielbasa on the menu.

Most of the food I had in Warsaw was excellent, especially at the Bristol, which boasts two elegant restaurants serving international and Polish specialties including the game for which the country is famous: Venison and elk were on the menu during my visit, along with exotica including sturgeon fin soup and Russian caviar served with seaweed waffles.

At a famous restaurant in the Old Town, Fokier, a place of many small dining rooms filled with flickering candlelight and antique furniture, I had a fabulous salmon tartare with red caviar and a hot white borscht with veal. Both were fine -- but served at an excruciatingly slow pace. Two and a half hours after I arrived, my main course still hadn't, so I left. Warsaw waiters also seem unable to deal with a woman ordering the wine. If there's a man at the table, even if he's the woman's guest, the waiter will give him the wine to taste. There is, by the way, no Polish wine, I was told by my guide. This is liberating. Tourists don't have to be polite about the local plonk, and the locals don't have to be patriotic about it. Everybody's free to drink French, Spanish, or the more affordable Bulgarian.

Warsaw's large royal park called Lazienki includes several palaces, one the lovely Palace on the Water, actually on a little island in the park's lake. The park is also home to an outdoor theater where audience and stage are separated by a moat, making a perfect setting for plays where part of the action is aquatic. And the park boasts a 17th-century villa where the king met his mistresses. Just outside is a pool with a single strong jet of water pulsing into the air. An inspiration to the king, no doubt: It must have been the Viagra of its day.

Warsaw is also the city of Chopin. The city's most famous musical son played the organ for three years in the ornate baroque Church of the Nuns of the Visitation. Nearby is the Church of the Holy Cross, where Chopin's sister brought the exiled composer's heart after his Paris funeral. The heart now rests inside a pillar in the church. In the Lazienki park is Waclaw Szymanowski's ``Monument to Chopin,'' a swirling, Art Nouveau design with a willow bending over the figure. It's heroic in scale and tumultuous in sensibility: I instinctively hummed a Polonaise while gazing at it.

The Nazis blew up the original monument, both to get bronze for cannons and as part of their program to eradicate Polish culture. But a plaster cast kept in the basement of the National Museum during the war made it possible to re-create the sculpture afterward, another example of the city's indomitable will.

A Chopin concert is de rigueur when visiting Warsaw, and they're not hard to find. I went to one in yet another of the palaces in the Lazienki park. The pianist -- Iwona Klimaszewska, a graduate of and now teacher at The State Academy of Music -- is part of a veritable Chopin industry. Her phrasing of the obligatory nocturnes, waltzes, and mazurkas was erratic and tempestuous, turning Chopin into a roller coaster. For anyone who wanted to continue the ride, during the intermission there were Klimaszewska CDs on sale in the palace's long court, which is filled with plaster casts of classical sculptures from the Parthenon and other Greek and Roman sites.

A visitor with only a couple of days to spend in Warsaw will have to make choices. You could do a tour emphasizing the tragic history of Warsaw's ill-fated Jewish community. You could do a Chopin pilgrimage. I'm an art and architecture fan, so collections and buildings were my focus, starting with the Bristol Hotel, where I stayed. Designed in Art Nouveau style, the Bristol opened in 1901. Interest in the new hotel was intense for several reasons. Chief among them was that its principal shareholder was Ignacy Paderewski, legendary pianist and later Poland's prime minister: The first sessions of Paderewski's government, in 1919, took place in the hotel. Later, the Bristol suffered first at the hands of the Germans, then the Soviets. In 1981, it shut down. A decade later, it was gloriously restored, for $50 million, its Art Nouveau ceiling paintings and stained glass and the famous glass elevator with its elaborate metalwork all re-created by dedicated conservationists. The hotel was reopened in 1993 by none other than Margaret Thatcher, herself a symbol of can-do capitalism.

Two major art museums I visited formed a study in architectural contrasts. The National Museum is a bleak gray modernist structure. Inside, it's also unwelcoming. The gift shop is a booth behind glass, and if you want to examine something for sale, you have to ask an attendant. The assumption that if you can get your hands on it, you'll steal it, is a holdover from Soviet times. If you get past the grimness, though, there are outstanding collections here, especially in medieval art. The stars of the show, though, are the haunting eighth- to 13th-century murals excavated by Polish archeologists at the cathedral in Faras, Nubia.

Warsaw's impressive Centre for Contemporary Art is housed in the Ujazdowski Castle, built in the 17th century, burned and bombed in the 20th. In the 1970s, the beautiful building with rounded towers anchoring each corner was rebuilt. The airy rooms are now home to the country's best display of new Polish art, as well as work by the usual international suspects. There's an excellent restaurant with fine terrace views, and a world-class gift shop featuring Polish crafts -- glass, ceramics, furniture. You're welcome to pick up and handle everything.

The one piece of architecture nearly every Varsovian loathes, on grounds of style as well as symbolism, is the Palace of Culture and Science, a 1950s monstrosity inflicted on Warsaw by the Soviets. It soars above nearly everything else in town and sprawls laterally, too. A debate over what to do with it rages: One suggestion is to hide it by erecting a quartet of even bigger buildings around it. It's all well and good for an American to scoff at the bombast of Soviet architecture, but arguably the second-ugliest building in Warsaw is the US Embassy, a dreary gray box.

A pilgrimage to a city thousands of miles away, merely to see a single painting, has the ring of romance -- and also of obsession. I'd always wanted to see Leonardo's ``Lady with Ermine,'' which, even in reproduction, intrigued me more than the ``Mona Lisa.'' It didn't matter to me that an ermine is a repulsive rodent. But traveling all the way from America to the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow just for the ``Lady''? Impossible. Traveling by train from Warsaw, though, seemed entirely reasonable. So I did. It was a 2 1/2-hour ride through a largely charmless landscape, except for poppy fields. (Poppy seed cake is virtually Poland's national dessert.) There were also occasional stork-sitings. There are 8,000 storks in Poland. They proliferate, like wildflowers do, because Polish farmers can't afford the chemical pesticides that would kill them off. Besides, storks are thought to bring good luck.

Krakow itself has had a bit of luck, architecturally speaking. The Soviets chased the Nazis out of the city before the Nazis had a chance to bomb it, so Krakow, unlike Warsaw, boasts authentically old buildings. Its churches, palaces, and market square -- Europe's second largest, after St. Mark's in Venice -- are exquisite. And the Wawel, the castle-and-cathedral-crowned hill from which Polish kings ruled for 500 years, offers a whole history of Polish architecture.

On a Saturday afternoon in June, I saw four weddings (and no funerals) in Krakow's churches, which, in the post- communist age, seem well-used and well-maintained. There's restoration going on everywhere. St. Mary's in the Market Square boasts the greatest piece of Gothic art in Poland and one of the largest of its kind anywhere: a huge wooden altarpiece that took sculptor Veit Stoss 12 years to carve, a tour de force for which he was paid the equivalent of the city budget for one whole year.

My favorite Krakow house of worship is the Franciscan Church, built in the 13th century but with a wild Art Nouveau interior designed hundreds of years later by Stanislaw Wyspianski, who filled the walls with stylized angels, pansies, poppies, stars, and geometric motifs that will remind Western viewers of William Morris. And there's a still-radical stained-glass window with a God who looks liquid.

Churches weren't my main mission in Krakow, though. The Leonardo was. ``Lady with Ermine'' is a moneymaker for the Czartoryski Museum, which occasionally rents it out to other countries. I went all the way to Poland without knowing for sure that the ``Lady'' was at home.

She was. And the Czartoryski Museum that houses her proved utterly charming, right down to its hospitable staff. Both at the ticket booth and the desk where you buy guidebooks, I made the rude if innocent mistake of trying to pay with rubles left from a stay in Russia. Considering what the Soviets did to Poland, the ticket-seller's reaction, a merry laugh, was gracious.

The museum's core collection is that of the Czartoryski family, aristocrats who founded the gallery in 1801 and moved it to its current quarters -- a complex consisting of a monastery, a palace, and an armory -- in 1876. The family had fabulous taste and the fortune to exert it, buying the Leonardo in 1800 and the museum's second-most-famous painting, Rembrandt's ``Landscape with the Good Samaritan,'' in 1828. The collections of European portraits, Italian majolica, and Etruscan art are also stellar.

Even though my visit was on a Saturday in high tourist season, the only two occupants of the small gallery housing the Leonardo were the ``Lady'' and I. No one is ever alone in the Louvre with the ``Mona Lisa,'' which is always surrounded by hordes. So this was a treat. And as if the curators knew you'd want to linger, there's a long bench in front of ``Lady with Ermine.''

Leonardo made the painting around 1490; it probably depicts Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Duke Lodovico Sforza, at whose Milanese court the painter was working. Part of the object's magic is that, unlike the ``Mona Lisa,'' who is depicted in front of a detailed landscape, the ``Lady'' is against a plain black background. She's removed from the particulars of time and place. She exudes a preternatural calm. Why? She is bathed in golden light. From where? She and the little white animal she cradles both look off to their left. At what? The painting's enigmas are part of what rivets you in front of it. The larger part, though, is its sheer beauty.

My ``Lady'' experience was well worth the effort to get there. Go. But time your visit carefully. European museums often have weird hours. Those in Mediterranean climes, for instance, tend to close for three-hour lunches just when jet-lagged Americans are ready to start their sightseeing day. The Czartoryski Museum stays open through lunch -- but closes for good at 3:30 in the afternoon.

If you have the time, I'd highly recommend extending this tour at both the beginning and end, arriving in Warsaw before the official itinerary starts, and lingering on in St. Petersburg afterward. If you're able to do that, book yourself into the Bristol Hotel in Warsaw. Rates start at $180 a night, including goodies like use of the indoor pool and a buffet breakfast so lavish and plentiful it could hold you right through lunch. There are also attractive weekend packages at even lower prices. Compared with the cost of a comparable hotel in, say, Paris, the Bristol is a true bargain. The Bristol Hotel is at Krakowskie Przedmiescie 42/44, 00-325 Warsaw. Telephone 011-48-39-12-10-61. Fax 011-48-39-12-10-67.

I flew trans-Atlantic on British Airways, which has frequent service to this part of the world -- including twice-daily service between London and Warsaw. For the short hops between countries, I flew on FinnAir, which I was happy to discover is a BA partner for frequent-flier mileage. The BA number is 800-AIRWAYS.