Every design for Wołomin

Twenty kilometres east of Warsaw, on the railway that carries on towards Białystok, Wołomin sits on the flat Masovian plain with the little Czarna river running through it. For centuries it was a modest village of minor gentry, first written down as Volunsk and overshadowed by busier Kobyłka and Radzymin next door, living off the surrounding forest: wax, honey, timber and tar sold in Praga and Warsaw.

The Muzeum Zofii i Wacława Nałkowskich tells the story of what changed. Once the railway arrived, Warsaw families came out here for the summer, and the writer Zofia Nałkowska kept a house that inspired her book House over meadows. Glassworks followed at the start of the twentieth century, remembered today by the Pomnik Wołomińskiego Hutnika Szkła, and the village was declared a town after Poland regained its sovereignty. The Polish counter-attack in the Battle of Warsaw was fought nearby. The Second World War brought a ghetto along the railway line and deportations to Treblinka, a loss marked by the Getto w Wołominie memorial.

Today Wołomin is the seat of its own county within the Warsaw metropolitan area, yet the old outline holds: two railway stations, a central square and the protected green of Rezerwat Grabicz.