Created in the 19th century, under the
Congress Kingdom, the square was designed to be an elegant area of the country's capital. Notable buildings included the
Palace of the Ministry of Revenues and Treasury (a building reconstructed by
Antonio Corazzi), the
Bank of Poland and the
Warsaw Stock Exchange (also by Corazzi). The square was originally
triangular-shaped. Between 1875 and 1878, the
Great Synagogue was built on the eastern side of the square, across from the palace. At the time of its building, it was the largest synagogue in Warsaw and one of the largest in the world. After the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, the Nazi occupiers blew up the building, destroying it. In the 1944
Warsaw Uprising, the remaining buildings on the square were destroyed. After the war, city planners reconstructed only its historic western part, changing it into a
rectangle. The synagogue was not rebuilt and currently in the same location is the
Błękitny Wieżowiec office building. Under the communist
Polish People's Republic, the square was renamed
Plac Dzierżyńskiego (Dzierżyński's Square) after
Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish-born communist politician and founder of the
Bolshevik Cheka political police. In 1951, a monument to Dzierżyński (by Zbigniew Dunajewski) was erected in the southern part of the square. Four decades later, in 1989, the statue's toppling helped mark the
fall of communism in Poland. ==Today==