Europe’s Old Towns, the historic quarters at the heart of cities across the continent, tell stories about European history that date back to the Middle Ages. Some are epic narratives; some are fairy-tale fantasies. But some of the most powerful stories they tell are about Europe’s recent history, from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day: about its greatest war, its greatest peace, and the great uncertainty about what lies ahead. They are stories of destruction, reconstruction, and rewriting.

The archetypal Old Town story begins in the 19th century, when historic urban quarters became obsolete. As cities expanded and modernised, their old centres were left behind. Prosperous residents moved out to grander suburbs; impoverished tenants replaced them. Municipal authorities came to see the increasingly overcrowded and dilapidated relics as obstructions to traffic, threats to public hygiene and obstacles to progress. They drew up demolition plans – and provoked reactions in local cultural milieux, from which conservationist movements arose, protesting that cities should take care of their historic kernels instead of erasing them. Historic quarters started to become Old Towns, recognised as sites of special symbolic and cultural importance.

Old Towns soon proved to have significance far beyond the lines of the medieval walls that marked their boundaries. The artists, architects and associated intellectuals who colonised Warsaw’s Old Town in the early part of the 20th century, before Poland regained its independence, saw the centre they established in a tenement house on the market square as a base of cultural resistance against Russian imperial rule. During the Second World War, the museum of which it became part was a base of armed resistance against the Nazi German occupiers, housing caches of weapons as well as of artworks. The occupiers themselves initially valued the Old Town, claiming it as evidence that Warsaw had fundamentally German roots, but they bombarded it relentlessly during the Uprising of 1944, and at the end of the war it was in ruins.

So were many historic urban quarters in Germany, destroyed by Allied bombing. Arthur Harris, head of the RAF’s Bomber Command, was unwavering in his conviction that the way for Britain to fight Germany was to destroy its cities, and the RAF’s studies had shown that the most effective way for aircraft to devastate a city was to set them ablaze. That was most effectively achieved by aiming at the old quarters in the centre, densely packed with timber-framed buildings. For Harris, the value of German old towns lay in their utility as firelighters – a term he used when noting the results of a trial raid on the Hanseatic city of Lübeck.

While bombing devastated the fabric of the historic quarters, their moral and symbolic value was buried under the wreckage of the Nazi order. Meanwhile in Warsaw, the symbolic value of the Old Town arose from its ruins. Its reconstruction, led by architects and conservationists who had risked their lives working for the resistance against the Nazis, was an awe-inspiring expression of national spirit. It was also an opportunity for the Soviet-installed regime to depict itself as authentically Polish. The authorities conceived the quarter as a representation of national history that would also be a model socialist housing estate, telling a story about how the Party would honour Poland’s heritage while providing the people with decent living conditions that they had been denied under capitalism, particularly in the mouldering tenements of the Old Town before the war.

In Germany, using reconstruction to glorify the nation’s compromised history was not an option. Many cities chose to put their pasts behind them, modernising their centres instead. Frankfurt became a skyscraper city and set a brutalist municipal building in the middle of its former Old Town – but then demolished it and built half-timbered houses on its concrete foundations, opening a ‘new Old Town’ in 2018. Old Towns are always works in progress.

They are also beautiful symbols of what Europe managed to achieve in the phase of its history that began in 1945 and was beginning to disintegrate as Frankfurt built its new historic quarter. A cobbled square in an old quarter of a European city, filled with people eating ice creams and chatting in their various languages, among strangers but at ease with them, is a scene that represents how far the continent has succeeded in transcending its history. But it is starting to look like a vision that might vanish, and the stories behind the facades remind us of why that might happen.

Marek Kohn is a writer and the author of The Stories Old Towns Tell, published by Yale University Press.