Region & History

Żyrardów wasn't built around a distillery but around a textile factory. Starting in 1829, the Frenchman Philippe de Girard established linen weaving mills here, and the town still bears his name today. Brick halls, workers' housing, and a tight street grid still shape the town. Wódka only came later, from 1910 onward, produced in its own distillery on the outskirts.

In Warsaw, production ran on a much larger scale at the same time. Between 1895 and 1897, the Warsaw Wódka Factory "Koneser" rose on the Praga bank of the Vistula, a brick complex with pointed turrets covering some 50,000 square meters. During the interwar period, more than 400 people worked here, and brands like Wyborowa, Luksusowa, and the simple Żytniówka all came out of the stills under state supervision.

That supervision had a name: Państwowy Monopol Spirytusowy, founded in 1924 under Finance Minister Władysław Grabski. The state reserved for itself the production and sale of spirytus and clear wódkas, allocated production quotas to distilleries, and collected handsomely in return, between 1924 and 1936, depending on the year, up to a third of the state budget came from the alcohol trade. World War II interrupted operations, after which the distilleries were nationalized and merged into the Polmos combine in 1959.

Koneser ceased production in 2002, and the machines fell silent after more than a hundred years. Rather than demolition, a slow transformation followed: the site became home to the Centrum Praskie Koneser, with apartments, galleries, and restaurants, while the former rectification building opened as the Muzeum Polskiej Wódki, the Museum of Polish Vodka.

Żyrardów took a different path. In 1993, the first bottles of a new brand left the old distillery: Belvedere, named after Warsaw's presidential palace. Two years later it arrived in the US, turning Polish wódka into a luxury product there for the first time.

Today the two places represent two sides of the same story. In Żyrardów, distilling continues; in Warsaw, it's remembered. Anyone who sees both understands why Masovia is more than just an address on a label.