Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Warsaw
grave (Warsaw, Poland)
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Polish: Grób Nieznanego Żołnierza) is a monument in Warsaw, Poland, dedicated to the unknown soldiers who have given their lives for Poland. It is one of many such national tombs of unknowns that were erected after World War I, and the most important such monument in Poland.
The monument, located at Piłsudski Square, is the only surviving part of the Saxon Palace that occupied the spot until World War II. Since 2 November 1925 the tomb houses the unidentified body of a young soldier who fell during the Defence of Lwów. Since then, earth from numerous battlefields where Polish soldiers have fought has been added to the urns housed in the surviving pillars of the Saxon Palace.
The Tomb is constantly lit by an eternal flame and assisted by a guard post provided by the three companies of the 1st Guards Battalion, Representative Regiment of the Polish Armed Forces. It is there that most official military commemorations take place in Poland and where foreign representatives lay wreaths when visiting Poland.
The changing of the guard takes place every full hour, 365 days a year.
History
In 1923, a group of unknown Varsovians placed, before Warsaw's Saxon Palace and the adjacent Saxon Garden, a stone tablet commemorating all the unknown Polish soldiers who had fallen in World War I and the subsequent Polish-Soviet War. This initiative was taken up by several Warsaw newspapers and by General Władysław Sikorski. On April 4, 1925, the Polish Ministry of War selected a battlefield from which the ashes of an unknown soldier would be brought to Warsaw.
“Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Warsaw” enters the record as grave (Warsaw, Poland). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tomb, Unknown and Soldier can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Warsaw” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.