Hala Gwardii

This guide to Hala Gwardii in Warsaw returns to May 1953, when a crowd of five thousand packed a war-scarred hall to watch welterweight Zygmunt Chychla face Soviet fighter Sergei Shcherbakov for a European title, a bout nobody expected a defeated, occupied country to be fighting on equal terms. It traces the hall's own path first, from a market hall that burned and served briefly as a bus depot to the training ground of the coach everyone called Papa. Look for the ring still set into the floor, and the small museum built around that night.