About This Location
Wąski Dunaj is one of the smallest streets in Warsaw’s Old Town. It runs for only about 160 meters, linking the Old Town Market Square area with Podwale, right by the line of the former defenses. The space feels like a passage between worlds - bright and busy near the market, then quieter as the walls and the Barbican area come closer. The name points to water that is no longer visible. For centuries this place was connected to a small stream called Dunaj. It began at a spring near today’s Szeroki Dunaj and flowed down toward the moat that once ran along Podwale. Old Polish also used “dunaj” as a general word for a big river, so later the two nearby streets were described as “wide” and “narrow” Dunaj to tell them apart. This lane has been rebuilt many times. In the Middle Ages the first houses here were wooden, and a major fire in 1478 destroyed much of the early Old Town. Over time, brick townhouses replaced wood, and the street’s shape slowly tightened into the narrow corridor seen today. Near the city walls there was once a tower, later replaced by a gate known as Brama Poboczna. When the gate was demolished in 1804, the street gained a clearer connection to Podwale. Wąski Dunaj also sits close to an early chapter of Jewish Warsaw. In the late 1300s and 1400s, part of the Old Town was home to a small Jewish community, and a synagogue once stood nearby, close to a lane later known as Żydowska or Abrahamowska. Little remains of that layout, but the street still holds the memory in its hidden edges and property lines. The most dramatic change came in 1944, when the Old Town was destroyed during the Second World War. What stands here now is the careful postwar reconstruction carried out in the years after 1945, restoring the street’s historic look while quietly marking what was lost. Nearby, the Little Insurgent monument on Podwale adds a human face to that story - a reminder of the city’s youngest messengers during the Warsaw Uprising.