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Shops, bars, restaurants and upmarket souvenir shops line Piwna and Swietojanska , the two narrow cobbled streets leading northwards from plac Zamkowy. Each street has a church worth a stopoff as well. On Piwna there's Kosciol sw. Martina (St Martin's Church), a fourteenth-century church whose Baroque interior was carefully restored after the war. Among those buried here is Adam Jarzibski, king's musician and author of the first guide to Warsaw - written in verse. You should take the opportunity to nip down to plac Kanonia at this point (lodged behind ul. Jezuitska, just north of the castle), where the narrowest house in Warsaw puts even the equivalents in Amsterdam to shame. On Swietojanska is the entrance to Archikatedra sw. Jana (St John's Cathedral), the main city church, an early fourteenth-century structure built on the site of an earlier wooden shrine, and subsequently remodelled in the local Mazovian Gothic style. Some of the bitterest fighting of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising took place around here. German tanks entered the church after destroying its southern side, and you can see sections of their caterpillar tracks built into the wall along ul. Dziekania . After the war, a lot of money was invested in rebuilding the cathedral in its original brick Gothic style. For all the hard work, though, the cathedral's a bare, rather cold sort of place. Most of the interest is provided by the tombstones of the dukes of Mazovia, a sixteenth-century crucifix from Nurnberg with real hair on the head, and a number of famous Poles lodged in the crypt. Notable among these are Nobel Prize-winning writer Henryk Sienkiewicz , former primate of Poland Cardinal Wyszynski and, the most recent addition, former pianist and prime minister Ignacy Paderewski , whose remains were installed here with much ceremony in July 1992 in the presence of presidents Lech Walesa and George Bush Senior, a fulfilment of the exile Paderewski's last wish that his body only be returned to a free Poland. The Catholic-dominated governments of the post-communist era have seen to it that the church's old official functions are revived, so, especially at weekends, there's a fair chance of your visit being cut short by the arrival of a visiting foreign dignitary (and the building is closed anyway between 11am and 2pm). Next to the cathedral is the Kosciol Jezuitski (Jesuit Church), a popular shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Charity, the city's patron saint. Its high belfry is the tallest in the Stare Miasto area, standing out for miles around.
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