In
ancient times, there was a place called Budorigum at or near the site of Wrocław. It was already mapped on
Claudius Ptolemy's map of AD 142–147. Settlements in the area existed from the 6th century onward during the
migration period. The
Ślężans, a
West Slavic tribe, settled on the
Oder river and erected a fortified
gord on
Ostrów Tumski. Wrocław originated at the intersection of two
trade routes, the
Via Regia and the
Amber Road. Archeological research conducted in the city indicates that it was founded around 940. In 985, Duke
Mieszko I of Poland conquered Silesia, and constructed new fortifications on Ostrów. The town was mentioned by Thietmar explicitly in the year
1000 AD in connection with its promotion to an
episcopal see during the
Congress of Gniezno.
Middle Ages , the only remaining part of a medieval
Piast castle During Wrocław's early history, control over it changed hands between the
Duchy of Bohemia (1038–1054), the
Duchy of Poland and the
Kingdom of Poland (985–1038 and 1054–1320). Following the
fragmentation of the Kingdom of Poland, the
Piast dynasty ruled the
Duchy of Silesia. One of the most important events during this period was the foundation of the
Diocese of Wrocław in 1000. Along with the
Bishoprics of
Kraków and
Kołobrzeg, Wrocław was placed under the
Archbishopric of Gniezno in
Greater Poland, founded by
Pope Sylvester II through the intercession of Polish duke (and later king)
Bolesław I the Brave and Emperor
Otto III, during the Gniezno Congress. In the years 1034–1038 the city was affected by the
pagan reaction in Poland. By 1139, a settlement belonging to Governor
Piotr Włostowic (also known as Piotr Włast
Dunin) was built, and another on the left bank of the River Oder, near the present site of the university. While the city was largely Polish, it also had communities of Bohemians (Czechs),
Germans,
Walloons and
Jews. erected in the 1220s at
Ostrów Tumski (Cathedral Island), the city's oldest section In the 13th century, Wrocław was the political centre of the divided Polish kingdom. After the Mongol invasion, the town was partly populated by
German settlers who, in the ensuing centuries, gradually became its dominant population. In 1274 prince
Henry IV Probus gave the city its
staple right. In the 13th century, two Polish monarchs were buried in Wrocław churches founded by them, Henry II the Pious in the
St. Vincent church and Henryk IV Probus in the
Holy Cross church. Wrocław, which for 350 years had been mostly under Polish
hegemony, fell in 1335, after the death of
Henry VI the Good, to
John of Luxembourg. His son Emperor
Charles IV in 1348 formally incorporated the city into the
Holy Roman Empire. Between 1342 and 1344, two fires destroyed large parts of the city. Despite the annexation by Bohemia, trade still took place mainly between Poland and Western Europe. In 1474, after almost a century, the city left the Hanseatic League. Also in 1474, the city was besieged by combined Polish-Czech forces. However, in November 1474, Kings
Casimir IV of Poland, his son
Vladislaus II of Bohemia, and Matthias Corvinus of Hungary met in the nearby village of
Muchobór Wielki (present-day a district of Wrocław), and in December 1474 a
ceasefire was signed according to which the city remained under the rule of Corvinus. The following year was marked by the publication in Wrocław of the
Statuta Synodalia Episcoporum Wratislaviensium (1475) by Kasper Elyan, the first ever
incunable in Polish, containing the proceedings and prayers of the Wrocław bishops.
Renaissance and the Reformation In the 16th century, the Breslauer Schöps
beer style was created in Breslau. The
Protestant Reformation reached the city in 1518 and it converted to the new rite. However, starting in 1526
Silesia was ruled by the Catholic
House of Habsburg. In 1618, it supported the
Bohemian Revolt out of fear of losing the right to
religious freedom. During the ensuing
Thirty Years' War, the city was occupied by
Saxon and
Swedish troops and lost thousands of inhabitants to the
plague. The
Emperor brought in the
Counter-Reformation by encouraging Catholic orders to settle in the city, starting in 1610 with the
Franciscans, followed by the
Jesuits, then
Capuchins, and finally
Ursuline nuns in 1687. Halley's tables and analysis, published in 1693, are considered to be the first true actuarial tables, and thus the foundation of modern
actuarial science. During the Counter-Reformation, the intellectual life of the city flourished, as the Protestant
bourgeoisie lost some of its dominance to the Catholic orders as patrons of the arts.
Enlightenment period during the
Seven Years' War (
Third Silesian War 1756–1763) One of two main routes connecting
Warsaw and
Dresden ran through the city in the 18th century and Kings
Augustus II the Strong and
Augustus III of Poland often traveled that route. The city became the centre of German
Baroque literature and was home to the First and Second Silesian school of poets. In 1742, the
Schlesische Zeitung was founded in Breslau. In the 1740s the
Kingdom of Prussia annexed the city and most of Silesia during the
War of the Austrian Succession.
Habsburg Empress
Maria Theresa ceded most of the territory in the
Treaty of Breslau in 1742 to Prussia. Austria attempted to recover Silesia during the
Seven Years' War at the
Battle of Breslau, but they were unsuccessful. The Venetian Italian adventurer,
Giacomo Casanova, stayed in Breslau in 1766.
Industrial age The
Confederation of the Rhine had increased prosperity in Silesia and in the city. The removal of fortifications opened room for the city to expand beyond its former limits. Breslau became an important railway hub and industrial centre, notably for linen and
cotton manufacture and the metal industry. The reconstructed university served as a major centre of science;
Johannes Brahms later wrote his
Academic Festival Overture to thank the university for an honorary doctorate awarded in 1879. In 1821, the
(Arch)Diocese of Breslau withdrew from dependence on the Polish
archbishopric of Gniezno, and became an exempt see. In 1822, the Prussian police discovered the
Polonia Polish youth resistance organisation and carried out arrests of its members and searches of their homes. After the unsuccessful Polish
November Uprising, the city was an important contact point between partitioned Poland and the
Great Emigration in Western Europe. It also remained an important center of Polish printing. In 1848, many local Polish students joined the
Greater Poland uprising against Prussia. On 5 May 1848, a convention of Polish activists from the Prussian and Austrian partitions of Poland was held in the city. On 10 October 1854, the
Jewish Theological Seminary opened. The institution was the first modern rabbinical seminary in Central Europe. In 1863 the brothers
Carl and Louis Stangen founded the travel agency Stangen, the second travel agency in the world. The city was subjected to Germanisation policies, yet it retained a sizeable Polish population. Local Poles took part in Polish national mourning after the Russian massacre of Polish protesters in
Warsaw in February 1861, and also organised several patriotic Polish church services throughout 1861. Secret Polish correspondence, weapons, and insurgents were transported through the city. After the outbreak of the uprising in 1863, the Prussian police carried out mass searches of Polish homes, especially those of Poles who had recently come to the city. The city's inhabitants, both Poles and Germans, excluding the German aristocracy, largely sympathised with the uprising, and some Germans even joined local Poles in their secret activities. In June 1863 the city was officially confirmed as the seat of secret Polish insurgent authorities. In January 1864, the Prussian police arrested a number of members of the Polish insurgent movement. , 1900 The
Unification of Germany in 1871 turned Breslau into the sixth-largest city in the
German Empire. Its population more than tripled to over half a million between 1860 and 1910. The 1900 census listed 422,709 residents. In 1890, construction began of Breslau Fortress as the city's defences. Important landmarks were inaugurated in 1910, the
Kaiser bridge (today
Grunwald Bridge) and the
Technical University, which now houses the
Wrocław University of Technology. The 1910 census listed 95.7% of the population as German-speakers, with 15,107 Polish-speakers (3%), and 3,431 (0.7%) as bilingual in Polish and German, although some estimates put the number of
Poles in the city at the time at 20,000 to 30,000. The population was 58% Protestant, 37% Catholic (including at least 2% Polish) , 1890–1900 , built in 1902–1904 In 1913, the newly built
Centennial Hall housed an exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the historical
German Wars of Liberation against
Napoleon and the first award of the
Iron Cross. The Centennial Hall was built by
Max Berg (1870–1947), since 2006 it is part of the world heritage of UNESCO. The central station (by
Wilhelm Grapow, 1857) was one of the biggest in Germany and one of the first stations with electrified railway services. Since 1900 modern department stores like Barasch (today "Feniks") or Petersdorff (built by architect
Erich Mendelsohn) were erected.
First World War and interwar period During
World War I, in 1914, a branch of the
Organizacja Pomocy Legionom ("Legion Assistance Organisation") operated in the city with the goal of gaining support and recruiting volunteers for the
Polish Legion, but three Legions' envoys were arrested by the Germans in November 1914 and deported to Austria, and the organisation soon ended its activities in the city. During the war, the German administration operated seven forced labour camps for
Allied prisoners of war in the city. Following the war, Breslau became the capital of the newly created Prussian
Province of Lower Silesia of the
Weimar Republic in 1919. After the war the Polish community began holding masses in Polish at the Church of Saint Anne, and, as of 1921, at St. Martin's and a Polish School was founded by Helena Adamczewska. In 1920 a Polish
consulate was opened on the Main Square. In August 1920, during the Polish
Silesian Uprising in
Upper Silesia, the Polish Consulate and School were destroyed, while the Polish Library was burned down by a mob. The number of Poles as a percentage of the total population fell to just 0.5% after the re-emergence of
Poland as a state in 1918, when many moved to Poland. Up to the beginning of World War II, Breslau was the largest city in Germany east of
Berlin. Known as a stronghold of
left wing liberalism during the German Empire, Breslau eventually became one of the strongest support bases of the
Nazi Party, which in the 1932 elections received 44% of the city's vote, their third-highest total in all Germany. The
Gestapo began actions against Polish and Jewish students (see:
Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau),
Communists,
Social Democrats, and
trade unionists. Arrests were made for speaking Polish in public, and in 1938 the Nazi-controlled police destroyed the Polish cultural centre. Also many other people seen as "undesirable" by Nazi Germany were sent to
concentration camps. The Sportsfest was held to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the German Wars of Liberation against Napoleon's invasion. In November 1939, the Germans imprisoned 173 Polish professors and lecturers from
Kraków's universities in the city, and then deported them to the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp (see
Sonderaktion Krakau). For most of the war, the fighting did not affect the city. During the war, the Germans opened the graves of medieval Polish monarchs and local dukes to carry out
anthropological research for
propaganda purposes, wanting to demonstrate German "
racial purity". As the war continued, refugees from bombed-out German cities, and later refugees from farther east, swelled the population to nearly one million, Approximately 3,400–3,800 men were imprisoned in three subcamps, among them Poles,
Russians,
Italians,
Frenchmen,
Ukrainians,
Czechs,
Belgians,
Yugoslavs,
Dutchmen,
Chinese, and about 1,500
Jewish women were imprisoned in the fourth camp. three subcamps of the
Stalag VIII-C POW camp, and two Nazi prisons in the city, including a youth prison, with multiple forced labour subcamps. In 1945, the city became part of the front lines and was the site of the brutal
Siege of Breslau. Adolf Hitler had in 1944 declared Breslau to be a fortress (
Festung), to be held at all costs. An attempted evacuation of the city took place in January 1945, with 18,000 people freezing to death in icy snowstorms of weather. In February 1945, the
Soviet Army approached the city and the German
Luftwaffe began an
airlift to the besieged garrison. A large area of the city centre was demolished and turned into an airfield by the defenders. By the end of the three-month siege in May 1945, half the city had been destroyed. Breslau was the last major city in Germany to surrender, capitulating only two days before the end of the war in Europe. Following the
Yalta Conference held in February 1945, where the new
geopolitics of
Central Europe were decided, the terms of the
Potsdam Conference decreed that along with almost all of Lower Silesia, the city would become again part of
Poland The Polish name of Wrocław was declared official. There had been discussion among the
Western Allies to place the southern Polish-German boundary on the
Eastern Neisse, which meant post-war Germany would have been allowed to retain approximately half of Silesia, including those parts of Breslau that lay on the west bank of the Oder. However, the Soviet government insisted the border be drawn at the
Lusatian Neisse farther west. The Polish population was dramatically increased by the resettlement of Poles, partly due to postwar
population transfers during the forced
deportations from
Polish lands annexed by the Soviet Union in
the east region, some of whom came from
Lviv (
Lwów),
Volhynia, and the
Vilnius Region. However, despite the prime role given to re-settlers from the
Kresy, in 1949, only 20% of the new Polish population actually were refugees themselves. A small German minority (about 1,000 people, or 0.2% of the population) remains in the city, so that today the proportion of the Polish population compared to that of the Germans is the reverse of what it was a hundred years ago. In 1948, Wrocław organised the
Recovered Territories Exhibition and the
World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace.
Picasso's lithograph,
La Colombe (The Dove), a traditional, realistic picture of a pigeon, without an olive branch, was created on a napkin at the
Monopol Hotel in Wrocław during the
World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace. In 1963, Wrocław was declared a
closed city because of
a smallpox epidemic. logo In 1982, during
martial law in Poland, the
anti-communist underground organisations
Fighting Solidarity and
Orange Alternative were founded in Wrocław.
Wrocław's dwarves, made of bronze, famously grew out of and commemorate Orange Alternative. In 1983 and 1997,
Pope John Paul II visited the city. PTV Echo, the first non-state television station in Poland and in the post-communist countries, began to broadcast in Wrocław on 6 February 1990. In May 1997, Wrocław hosted the 46th International
Eucharistic Congress. In July 1997, the city was heavily affected by the
Millennium Flood, the worst flooding in post-war Poland, Germany, and the
Czech Republic. About one-third of the area of the city was flooded.
Municipal Stadium in Wrocław, opened in 2011, hosted three matches in Group A of the
UEFA Euro 2012 championship. In 2016, Wrocław was declared the
European Capital of Culture. In 2017, Wrocław hosted the
2017 World Games. Wrocław won the
European Best Destination title in 2018. Wrocław is now a unique European city of mixed heritage, with architecture influenced by Polish,
Bohemian,
Austrian, and
Prussian traditions, such as Silesian
Gothic and its
Baroque style of court builders of Habsburg Austria (
Fischer von Erlach). Wrocław has a number of notable buildings by German
modernist architects including the famous
Centennial Hall (1911–1913) designed by
Max Berg. == Geography ==