Warsaw, Poland

The Old Town (Stare Miasto) and New Town (Nowe Miasto) are the two oldest parts of Warsaw. Administratively, they are neighbourhoods in the district of Śródmieście. The Old Town is comparatively small to the old towns of many other European cities, as during the time of its development Warsaw was a small town of mostly local importance and not yet the capital of Poland. The New Town is called so because it was the first part of Warsaw to be built outside of the original city wall ring, but it is indeed not much newer than the old town and much older than most of other neighbourhoods of Warsaw.

Both the Old and New Town were almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, and were reconstructed after the war. While, due to the meticulous and painstaking efforts, the impression one gets is that of authentic historic places, it is a 20th-century reinterpretation of the history of this area, and is actually a mixture of buildings that existed in different periods, and in many cases a rather creative faux. Warsaw's Old and New Towns are charming, compact and very walkable. It is hardly apparent when you walk around today that the buildings around you are little more than 60, rather than 600, years old.