Rainbow Travel Agency

On your left once stood a giant steel arch, packed with artificial flowers and curved into a six-color rainbow at the center of Plac Zbawiciela.

Julita Wójcik did not set out to build a national nervous breakdown. In the summer of two thousand twelve, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute brought her Rainbow here from an earlier version shown in Brussels during Poland’s presidency of the European Union. The idea sounded almost suspiciously wholesome: love, peace, hope... an apolitical sign anyone could claim.

Its roots were even more traditional. Wójcik first created a version in two thousand ten at the Camaldolese Monastery in Wigry, where it helped support crumbling walls and pointed to the biblical covenant between God and humanity. Then Warsaw got involved, and Warsaw, as usual, did not keep things simple.

More than one thousand volunteers - seniors, students, artists - gathered at Zachęta and spent weeks threading sixteen thousand artificial flowers onto wires. Wójcik called it cooperativism: shared labor creating beauty together. Which is a lovely plan, right up until beauty lands in front of a church and acquires six colors.

That is where The Rainbow Controversy began. Many people embraced it as open, generous public art. Far-right nationalist and Catholic groups read it as an L-G-B-T symbol planted in a loaded spot, directly before the Church of the Holiest Saviour. The artwork’s meaning expanded far beyond the artist’s brief and turned into a test of what the square, and the city, could tolerate.

By late two thousand thirteen, people had attacked it again and again - fires, damage, reconstruction, then more damage. The worst came on the eleventh of November, two thousand thirteen, during the Independence March. The flowers melted, black smoke rose, and the burning arch against the church became one of those images a country cannot unsee. If you want, take a quick look at the before-and-after image in the app... it shows the jump from cheerful landmark to cultural wreckage in one glance.

And then came the counter-voice. The next day, citizens pushed fresh real flowers into the charred metal frame. Couples held a kiss-in beneath it. Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz said the city would rebuild it as many times as necessary, and Warsaw spent more than one hundred thousand zloty on reconstruction, adding non-flammable flowers and even sprinklers. When a city keeps repairing an artwork after repeated attacks, is it defending free expression... or just proving how badly a symbol can get under people’s skin?

By August two thousand fifteen, the fight ended in removal. Workers stripped off the flowers and dismantled the steel frame, but even that became a public event. Crowds gathered, watched in silence, and pocketed discarded blossoms as souvenirs - a sad festival for an object made of plastic flowers and very real feeling.

From here, continue to Constitution Square, about six minutes away. The app oddly lists visiting hours as nine A-M to ten P-M, closed Sunday... disciplined scheduling for a landmark that now survives mostly in memory.