Mazovia & Podlasie

Introducing Mazovia & Podlasie

Travel only 30km from Warsaw’s Old Town and you enter another Poland. Women bend double in fields, horse-drawn carts and tractors transport produce to market, wooden bridges and dirt roads await EU intervention, and castles and cathedrals dominate towns. Of course it’s not all R&R (rural and rustic) in Podlasie and Mazovia (Mazowsze in Polish), but the locals do a good job of convincing you otherwise.

Mazovia’s rolling landscape and rural bliss have a deceptively long history, but the telltale signs are easy to spot if you know where to look. Once a duchy, this province is dotted with castles, cathedrals and palaces, the biggest of which reside in the riverside towns of Płock and Pułtusk and the quiet village of Nieborów. Łódź is Mazovia’s reigning capital, with more going for it than meets the eye. It’s the country’s second-largest metropolis and would easily win ‘Poland’s Ugliest City’ if such a competition was held, but if you take the time to discover its palaces, art galleries and 19th-century redbrick textile factories, you’ll be happy you made the effort.

Podlasie is the verdant green lungs of Poland. Aside from a few patches of urbanisation, this large province is a bucolic paradise of farmland, forest and lakes. Its four national parks are splendid – Narew and Biebrza for their marshlands and birdlife; Wigry for its peaceful lake, pockets of forest and Augustów Canal; and Białowieża for its primeval forest and king of Polish fauna, the bison. Humans also play their part, supplying a couple of splendid skansens (open-air museums of traditional architecture) at Nowogród and Ciechanowiec, a touch of Muslim culture in Kruszyniany and Bohoniki, and Jewish heritage at Tykocin.

Last updated: Feb 17, 2009