Why it looks like this

By 1945 Warsaw had been systematically demolished — the Old Town blown up building by building after the 1944 uprising. Poland rebuilt it from evidence: pre-war surveys, photographs, and the detailed 18th-century cityscapes of Bellotto ('Canaletto'), recreating the market square and lanes so faithfully that UNESCO listed the reconstruction itself in 1980 as a unique act of heritage.

Around that resurrected core, the socialist decades drew a different city — wide avenues, the towering Palace of Culture and Science, big housing estates — so today's map is a collage: a copied medieval heart, communist monumentality, and a post-1989 skyline of glass.