Archaeologists digging beneath a car park on Emil Mlynarski Square in central Warsaw have pulled fragments of enormous ceiling lamps, two ceramic plates bearing royal portraits, and a sculpted medallion dated 1881 out of the buried cellars of a pre-war tenement block. Fire scars still run across the surviving walls, physical proof that whatever stood above the cellars burned down to its foundations sometime during the Second World War.
The Warsaw City Conservator of Monuments says several of the objects likely once belonged to the original Warsaw Philharmonic concert hall, whose ruins sat only a short walk from the dig site before the war leveled the building. One working theory from the office is that someone deliberately packed the fragile pieces into the cellar to shield them from the bombardment overhead, rather than the objects simply falling there when the floors above collapsed. Other pieces complicate that story rather than confirming it, and the office overseeing the excavation is being careful not to force a tidy narrative onto fragments that do not all agree with each other.
A sculpture signed a full two decades before the concert hall opened
Among the objects pulled from the cellar is a small sculptural medallion showing a man’s head in profile, signed by the sculptor Slawomir Celinski and inscribed with the year 1881 and the word “Warsaw.” Alongside it were parts of enormous ceiling lamps large enough that researchers suspect they once lit a hall’s main auditorium or foyer, plus a bronze horseman figurine, decorative platters, cutlery, and a bent metal wreath of laurel and oak leaves packed into the same rubble-filled space.
The 1881 date is the puzzle. The Warsaw Philharmonic’s original hall did not open until 1901, two decades after Celinski signed his medallion.
Two Polish kings on ceramic plates smashed in the rubble
Also recovered were fragments of two large ceramic plates decorated with portraits of the Polish monarchs Sigismund III Vasa and John III Sobieski. Sobieski’s image was a common choice for decorative Polish tableware well into the twentieth century, a legacy of his 1683 victory at Vienna that turned him into a national symbol romanticized throughout nineteenth-century literature. Plates carrying his likeness, and that of Sigismund III Vasa before him, would not have been unusual furnishings in a grand public building or a well-appointed apartment of the era.
No maker’s mark ties either plate directly to the Philharmonic. Both are, for now, plausible furnishings rather than proven ones, shattered and buried among glass fragments and other ornaments in a cellar someone apparently tried to shield from the bombardment overhead.
Fire traces that match a building burned twice in six years
Whatever else remains unresolved about individual objects, the structural evidence is unambiguous. Traces of fire can still be seen on the walls that survived above the cellar, showing the building that once stood there was completely burned out. That matches the documented fate of the original Philharmonic hall, which was burned during the 1939 Siege of Warsaw and then damaged again by bombing during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, five years later. Fire followed by explosive damage is exactly the sequence that would leave scorched cellar walls sealed under rubble for more than eighty years, undisturbed until a car park’s foundation work finally cut through them.
Roughly half the orchestra’s musicians died during the war, according to Filharmonia Narodowa’s own institutional history, and the hall itself did not reopen until February 21, 1955, rebuilt in a Socialist Realism style by architects Eugeniusz Szparkowski and Henryk Bialobrzeski that bore little resemblance to Karol Kozlowski’s original 1901 design. The double destruction, first by fire and then by bombing, is consistent with cellars that show scorching but were never fully cleared before the postwar rebuild moved the venue’s main entrance to a different street entirely.
A square named for the conductor who opened the original hall
Emil Mlynarski Square takes its name from the Polish conductor and violinist who founded the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and led it from 1901 to 1905, at the same hall whose remnants may now be surfacing beneath a parking lot that carries his name.
He later premiered Karol Szymanowski’s opera “King Roger” and composed a symphony dedicated to Poland before his death in Warsaw in 1935, a career the conservator’s office is not directly investigating but one that gives the square, and the excavation beneath it, its name. The dig is continuing as part of the car park’s redevelopment, and the office has not said how many more objects it expects to recover before work moves forward. What has already come out of the ground is enough to place a documented wartime fire, a set of royal portraits, and a sculpture two decades older than the building it may be tied to all in the same buried room, without settling which of them, if any, actually came from the Philharmonic itself.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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