Taylor Swift Tells Warsaw Fans to Calm Down, Those Air Raid Sirens They’re Hearing Are Totally Normal
Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour juggernaut has found cities around the world twist themselves into pretzels to welcome the singer’s stadium-packing juggernaut. But when Swifties start filing into PGE Narodowy stadium on Thursday (August 1) for the singer’s show in Warsaw they might mistake the alarming sound of air raid sirens for some kind of bizarre welcome tradition.
It’s not.
“At 5pm on August 1st, sirens will sound out while the air force takes the skies in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, please DO NOT panic or be alarmed,” the official Eras Tour X account warned on Wednesday.
The sirens are part of the Polish city’s commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, which was a 63-day rebellion by Polish insurgents against five years of crushing occupation by the Nazis during WWII. According to the Associated Press, the whole city stops and alarms sound every year on August 1 at the exact time in the afternoon when the uprising began. Thousands of fans attending the show are expected to be at or near the stadium for the evening show when the alerts go off.
Polish news site Onet published a note to Swifites to explain the significance of the day to the local population. “We ask you to remain calm and not to panic. In this way every year residents pay tribute to the heroes of 1944. Those who will be at that moment already outside the stadium, please remain quiet and get up,” it read.
Thursday night’s show is the first of three gigs in Warsaw before Swift moves on to Vienna next week for shows on August 8, 9, and 10. She will wrap up the European leg of the tour in London, with a string of five shows at Wembley Stadium on August 15, 16, 17, 19 and 20 before returning to North America for a six-night run in Toronto beginning on November 14.
Check out the warning below.
Gil Kaufman
Billboard
