SMYK
Landmark children's store inside a restored nineteen-fifties glass-fronted department store.
This guide to SMYK in Warsaw opens on a September night in 1975, when a fire tore through the sixth floor of Warsaw's grandest department store and gutted everything but its concrete skeleton, a glass-fronted showcase built in the early 1950s as the pride of postwar reconstruction. Out of that wreckage came something unexpected: reopened on Christmas Day 1977 as Smyk, a children's shop, soon the largest in the country, where generations of Varsovians took their first escalator ride. The guide follows the store through its 2013 closure and years of renovation. Listen for the oak floors and glass front restored around you.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.