Praga, the part of Warsaw that grew on the eastern bank of the Vistula, was long a district apart, and its great church was conceived to assert its standing. Built in brick in a vigorous neo-Gothic manner during the later nineteenth century, the church of Saint Michael the Archangel and Saint Florian the Martyr raised two tall spires above a quarter of workshops, tenements and markets. Its history then followed the city's: the building was blown up by German forces during the Second World War and rebuilt in the decades that followed, becoming the cathedral of a newly created diocese covering the right bank. The reconstruction restored the soaring proportions, the pointed arcades and the brick facades, while the surrounding streets kept a texture that Warsaw's western half largely lost. Filmed here, the cathedral becomes a way into the less familiar side of the Polish capital, where destruction, faith and working-class identity are inseparable from the skyline.
