Castle Square

This guide to Castle Square in Warsaw opens on September 1, 1944, when German soldiers plant explosives beneath the bronze King Sigismund III, who has watched over the square for three centuries, and topple him into the cobblestones. It traces the column back to 1644, when the king's son raised it as one of Europe's first monuments to a ruler rather than a saint, and follows the fallen statue's afterlife as a photograph and a wartime exhibit. Restorers, the guide notes, spent years studying the broken figure before deciding what came next.