What’s in a name? Driving through Saxony en route to Wroclaw in Poland, we passed road signs directing us to ‘Breslau (Wroclaw)’. During its history, Wroclaw has had at least two dozen different names, but this was still surprising because although Breslau was the once thriving capital of the German region of Silesia, it hasn’t been part of Germany or officially called Breslau for the last 75 years.
Whatever it has been called over the centuries, Wroclaw has a long and storied history dating to before it was first recorded in the 10th century as the Bohemian stronghold of Vratislavia. Sadly, a thousand years of existence is largely defined by one of the most turbulent, brutal and tragic recent histories of any city in Europe.
It’s said that it was Frederick the Great himself who gave Breslau its name when it became part of the Kingdom of Prussian in 1741. This crowned 500 years of German migration to the region and Prussia’s victory over Austria in the early stages of the War of Austrian Succession, a conflict that made Prussia a European power.
Already a city of some renown, Breslau became a major economic, educational and cultural centre with a magnificent architectural legacy. Fast forward to May 1945 and Breslau lay in ruins. Crushed by the ferocity of the Soviet Red Army after Hitler declared it Festung Breslau, a fortress to be defended at all costs. German survivors were brutalised and murdered by Red Army soldiers.
Breslau’s post-war fate had been decided by the victorious Allies at the Yalta Conference just days before the Russian’s encircled the city on 15 February 1945. Shortly after its surrender (four days after the fall of Berlin) on 6th May, it was renamed Wroclaw and ceded along with swathes of formerly German lands to Poland as compensation for Polish lands given to Soviet Russia.
Over 70 per cent of the city lay in ruin, 170,000 civilians had died thanks to the Nazis’ refusal to evacuate, and Russian troops rampaged through the city. In the aftermath, tens-of-thousands of ethnic Germans were either killed or forced out of their homes and deported to within the new borders of Germany. They were replaced by ten-of-thousands of Poles forced from their homes in the East.
This truly tragic history makes it seem all the more unlikely that we’d find Wroclaw a delightful and welcoming city in which we instantly felt at home. Yet that’s exactly the effect this vibrant and youthful place had on us. Easy going, excellent food, an heroically rebuilt and preserved historic centre, and a politically liberal progressive city government.
There are, it’s fair to say, some spectacularly ugly reminders of Breslau’s rebirth as Wroclaw. Despite historically accurate rebuilding, Poland’s Communists couldn’t afford to reconstruct the whole city. One of the most hideous results is Plac Nowy Targ, a once pleasant square known as the Neumarkt until 1945, and now a desolate space surrounded by aesthetically challenged buildings.
It’s not the only example, and hardly seems to matter as you wander across Cathedral Island (this is a town of islands), walk through the beautiful Rynek, the former market square surrounded by colourful gabled town houses and now home to cafes, restaurants and bars, or meander the atmospheric Old Town’s cobbled streets. Wroclaw’s preserved glories are many.
This helps explain the continued use of Breslau, and the ‘nostalgia tourism‘ that draws Germans in search of their roots, including from the once thriving Jewish community of 20,000 people. It was Germany’s third largest Jewish community before the Nazis came to power, those who had not fled by 1938 were transported to near-certain death in the concentration camps. It’s a history reflected in the White Stork Synagogue – the only one to survive the violence of Kristallnacht.
Absent of tourists thanks to the coronavirus pandemic (which also closed many museums), Wroclaw was fascinating and we wished we had more than weekend to explore it.