Wrocław sits on the Oder and its branches, on ground that over a thousand years belonged to Poland, Bohemia, the Habsburgs, Prussia and Germany, and since 1945 to Poland again, after an almost complete exchange of population. The city was 70 percent destroyed during the siege of Festung Breslau, which lasted until May 1945.
Market Square and town hall
The square is the third largest medieval market place in Poland, and the town hall on it was built over two hundred years, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, which its layers of style make obvious. Its eastern facade with carved gables and a clock of 1580 is what people come for. In the cellars is the Piwnica Świdnicka, one of the oldest restaurants in Europe.
Ostrów Tumski
The oldest part of the city, formerly an island, with the cathedral of St John the Baptist, the collegiate church of the Holy Cross and brick streets where every evening a lamplighter lights nearly a hundred gas lamps by hand. This is not a performance for visitors but standing practice.
Centennial Hall
Built in 1913 by Max Berg for the centenary of the Battle of Leipzig, with a reinforced concrete dome spanning 65 metres, the largest in the world at the time. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 2006 and considered a turning point in the history of concrete architecture. The Pergola with its multimedia fountain and the zoo with its Afrykarium are next door.
The Racławice Panorama
A canvas 15 by 114 metres, painted in 1894, showing the battle of Racławice, viewed from a central platform in a purpose-built rotunda with the ground modelled in front of the painting so the boundary disappears. Entry every half hour and worth booking.
The dwarfs
They began with Orange Alternative, a happening movement of the 1980s that painted dwarfs on the paint blots covering anti-communist graffiti. The first bronze figure was placed in 2001; there are now over six hundred and the city maintains an official map.
The exchange
Wrocław, Breslau and Vratislav are the same city in successive centuries and states. After 1945 the German population was expelled and the city was resettled largely by Poles from Lwów and the eastern borderlands, who brought the Racławice Panorama and the Ossolineum collections with them.