St. Anne's Church

This guide to St. Anne's Church in Warsaw follows its free-standing bell tower, raised in 1582 and folded into the city's defensive walls rather than the church itself, and the long run of fires and rebuildings that followed for both structures. You'll hear about the Swedish and German troops who looted and torched the church in the 1650s, the twentieth-century damage it took in 1939 and again during the 1944 Uprising, and the neoclassical facade added by architect Chrystian Piotr Aigner in 1788. It's a story of a building rebuilt again and again, told partly from the top of a hundred forty eight steps.