Mokotów, Warsaw — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Mokotów?

Mokotów keeps its set pieces in parks, not on a main square. Królikarnia, the classicist villa Domenico Merlini raised between 1782 and 1786 for Charles Thomatis, stands on the escarpment off Puławska Street and has held a museum of sculpture since 1965. Szuster Palace crowns Park Morskie Oko.

War took it in 1944 and the 1960s put it back, and the Museum of the Polish Peasant Movement holds its own collection further south again. Łazienki Palace is not in Mokotów at all, but over the northern boundary in Śródmieście, near enough to walk to and far enough to belong to another district.

What is the history of Mokotów?

Mokotów first appears in the records of 1367, as the village of Mokotowo. Magnates and wealthy burghers built mansions and garden palaces here through the eighteenth century, well before the city reached them. Warsaw absorbed the area in 1916.

The 1930s rebuilt most of it in modernist blocks, and because the majority of those buildings came through the Second World War, Mokotów is one of the few quarters of Warsaw where the pre-war street still stands. Mokotów Prison on Rakowiecka Street, raised by the Russians in the last years of the Partitions of Poland, carries the darker half of that record.

Where is Mokotów?

Mokotów fills the ground between Śródmieście and Ursynów, dropping from the Warsaw Escarpment to the Vistula along its eastern edge.