Warsaw : Poland
On February 27, 1861 a crowd in Warsaw protesting Russian rule over Poland was fired upon by Russian troops killing five protesters. Warsaw become the capital of newly independent Poland again in 1918.
Warsaw flourished in the late nineteenth century under Mayor Sokrates Starynkiewicz (1875 – 1892), a Russian-born General appointed by Tsar Alexander III. Under Starynkiewicz, Warsaw saw its first water and sewerage system designed and built (by English engineer William Lindley and his son, William Heerlein Lindley), as well as expansion or modernization of trams, street lighting and gas works.
In the course of the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920 there was a huge Battle of Warsaw fought on the eastern outskirts of the city in which the capital of Poland was defended and the Red Army defeated.
Warsaw is notable among Europe’s capital cities not for its size, its age, or its beauty but for its indestructibility. It is a phoenix that has risen repeatedly from the ashes. Having suffered dreadful damage during the Swedish and Prussian wars of 1655-1656, it was again assaulted in 1794, when the Russian army massacred the population of the right-bank suburb of Praga. Its most remarkable act of survival, though, was its rebirth following almost complete destruction during the Second World War.
