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DAY 23/247 1981 – MINSK, BELORUSSIA TO WARSAW, POLAND

Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland, set on the Vistula River in east-central Poland Its historical Old Town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The first fortified settlements on the site of today's Warsaw were located in Bródno (9th/10th century) and Jazdów (12th/13th century). After Jazdów was raided by nearby clans and dukes, a new fortified settlement was established on the site of a small fishing village called "Warszowa".

The modern-day city was established in about 1300 and the first historical document attesting to its existence dates to 1313. With the completion of St John's Cathedral in 1390, Warsaw became one of the seats of the Dukes of Masovia and was officially made capital of the Masovian Duchy in 1413.

Warsaw rose to prominence in the late 16th century, when Sigismund III decided to move the Polish capital and his royal court from Kraków.

In 1573, the city gave its name to the Warsaw Confederation which formally established religious freedom in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Due to its central location between the Commonwealth's two major cities of Kraków and Vilnius, Warsaw became the capital of the Commonwealth and the Polish Crown when Sigismund III Vasa transferred his royal court in 1596.

In the subsequent years Warsaw significantly expanded to the south and westwards. Several private independent districts were the property of aristocrats and the gentry, which they ruled by their own laws.

Between 1655 and 1658 the city was besieged and pillaged by the Swedish, Brandenburgian and Transylvanian forces. The conduct of the Great Northern War (1700–1721) also forced Warsaw to pay heavy tributes to the invading armies.

The reign of Augustus II and Augustus III was a time of great development for Warsaw, which turned into an early capitalist city. The Saxon monarchs employed many German architects, sculptors and engineers, who rebuilt the city in a style similar to Dresden.

The year 1727 marked the opening of the Saxon Garden in Warsaw, the first publicly accessible park. The Załuski Library, the first Polish public library and the largest at the time, was founded in 1747. Stanisław II Augustus, who remodelled the interior of the Royal Castle, also made Warsaw a centre of culture and the arts. He extended the Royal Baths Park and ordered the construction or refurbishment of numerous palaces, mansions and richly-decorated tenements. This earned Warsaw the nickname Paris of the North.

Warsaw remained the capital of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1795, when it was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia in the third and final partition of Poland; it subsequently became the capital of the province of South Prussia.

Warsaw was made the capital of a newly created French client state, known as the Duchy of Warsaw, after a portion of Poland's territory was liberated from Prussia, Russia and Austria by Napoleon in 1806. Following Napoleon's defeat and exile, the 1815 Congress of Vienna assigned Warsaw to Congress Poland, a constitutional monarchy within the eastern sector under a personal union with Imperial Russia.

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