Kampinoski National Park

A cover posted from Kampinoski National Park. 

Kampinos National Park  is a National Park in east-central Poland, in Masovian Voivodeship, on the north-west outskirts of Warsaw.

Although the park was created in 1959, the idea was born much earlier on – already in the 1920s. The ancient Puszcza Kampinoska (Kampinos Forest) is on the UNESCO’s list of biosphere reserves. The Kampinos National Park is not particularly big – at the moment its area covers about 385,44 km2 of which about 12% is under a strict protection.

The land of the Kampinos National Park was created during the last ice age by waters of melting glaciers. On the area of the banks of this ancient river sandy dunes formed, while where there used to be the riverbed – swamps.

This is truly wonderful to walk from one area to another. One moment you struggle to walk on sandy paths, the other you watch rich grasses and reeds growing by streams and swamps.

The real gem is the Kampinos’s fauna: the Park’s symbol is a moose which was reintroduced to the park in the ‘50s

Germans used this forest as a mass killing place: at the Palmiry cemetery and memorial, there are graves of those secretly murdered here by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945. Being so close to Warsaw, many of the inhabitants of Warsaw – both those involved in the underground resistance as well as regular people caught by chance in order to terrorize the population – were brought here to their deaths.

Thanks Wojtek for the postcard and the cover !