The Town Hall
Poland's finest civic Gothic with its clock.
Public domain · Gerd Eichmann — CC BY 4.0 · Gerd Eichmann — CC BY 4.0 · Gerd Eichmann — CC BY 4.0
The Orange Alternative (1980s): a student movement painting dwarfs over censorship's wall blotches — every erasure got its dwarf — and marching absurdist dwarf demonstrations that baffled the police: how do you arrest a dwarf? Mockery as the weapon repression couldn't answer — and the city immortalised it in multiplying bronze: every shop and institution commissions its own until the hunt never ends.
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Wroclaw's Rynek is Poland's second-greatest medieval square — and its most colour-joyful: rainbow façades around the Gothic Town Hall (1290-1504) with its astronomical clock and stone ornament counted Poland's finest civic Gothic — at its corner the arch-joined houses of Jaś and Małgosia (Hansel and Gretel), St. Elisabeth's tower of 300 steps behind them. Its most famous secret sits below the knees: the krasnale — bronze dwarfs scattered by the hundred (begun 2005 saluting the Orange Alternative movement that mocked communism with painted dwarfs) — a dwarf hauling a cart, a dwarf dousing a lantern, a dwarf at an ATM: hunting them is children's complete obsession, their maps sold — the count past eight hundred citywide. The square rings with cafés and evening music — and Stare Jatki, the old butchers' lanes with their galleries and the droll Slaughtered Animals monument, adjoin: joy is Wroclaw's official temperament.
Poland's finest civic Gothic with its clock.
The arch-joined pair — Hansel and Gretel in stone.
The butchers' lanes as galleries and droll monument.
Rynek, 50-101 Wroclaw