Our second and last stop in Poland was the city of Wroclaw (pronounced vrots-woo-av). Called Breslau when it was ruled by Germans, Wroclaw sits on the Oder River, which farther north forms the border between Germany and Poland.
Wroclaw reminds me of Poznan, but everything is a bit bigger: the population (670,000), the train station (which looks like a bright yellow castle), the pedestrianized areas of the city center, and the traditional patrician homes that loom over the old market square. The crowds of tourists and revelers thronging the old center in August were also bigger than in Poznan.
We only spent a couple of days in Wroclaw, so we didn’t have time to fully appreciate the cultural and recreational opportunities the city offers. But we did enjoy two things that make Wroclaw special: its waterside promenades and its population of tiny gnomes.
Wroclaw was a walled city from medieval times until the early 1800s, when it was conquered by Napoleon’s army. The Napoleonic administration had the old walls and bastions torn down and began a process (which continued throughout the 1800s) of turning where they had stood into park land for the city. Today, the semicircular route of the former walls is a lovely walking and biking path along the old moat.
Besides welcome shade on a hot day, the path offers good views of monumental buildings and memorials to famous Poles: from Renaissance astronomer Copernicus to Captain Witold Pilecki, a World War II hero we were fascinated to discover. A Polish Army officer described as “one of the bravest men of this world,” Pilecki allowed himself to be captured and sent to—and later escaped from—the Auschwitz concentration camp to organize resistance among the prisoners and bring news of the camp’s conditions to the outside world. (Look him up; you’ll be amazed.)
Another memorial in Wroclaw to political resistance takes a more whimsical form: tiny metal gnome sculptures scattered around the city. In the 1980s, an underground youth movement started in Wroclaw called the Orange Alternative, which aimed to mock the authoritarian communist government in peaceful, absurdist ways. Whenever the authorities painted over anticommunist graffiti, Orange Alternative members repainted the same spot with cartoon figures of gnomes/dwarves (the same word in Polish).
The movement culminated in a demonstration in which more than 10,000 people marched through Wroclaw wearing orange dwarf hats. As one of the leaders explained, “Can you treat a police officer seriously when he is asking you: ‘Why did you participate in an illegal meeting of dwarfs?’”
After the communist government fell, a metal gnome statute was erected downtown to commemorate the protests. Soon other, smaller ones started appearing around the city. Today, there are more than 1,000 gnome statues in Wroclaw, and the number keeps growing. Some are commissioned by the city or by businesses; others appear spontaneously. They show up in all sorts of places, often doing things linked to those places (a bus full of gnomes at the bus station, a gnome orchestra by the concert hall, a gnome with a plate of spaghetti next to an Italian restaurant).
Wroclaw’s gnomes have become symbols of the city and beloved tourist attractions. The tourism office publishes a map of some of their names and locations, so visitors can go on their own gnome hunts. Melissa and I found some that represent important aspects of our lives: the artist gnome, the traveler gnome, and the laptop gnome (which I shamelessly dubbed the digital gnomad). In other historical cities, we’re always trying to remember to look up so as not to miss architectural details. In Wroclaw, we’ve also had to remember to look down.
