Arsenał Miejski, Wrocław

Arsenał Miejski is a historic Gothic arsenal arranged around a courtyard. Its story reaches back to the unfinished brick castle commissioned by Duke Henry IV Probus at the end of the thirteenth century. In 1459, the city council ordered a granary here for provisions during a siege; from the sixteenth century, weapons were gathered inside and the building became a military storehouse.

Gunpowder was kept elsewhere, in a tower built for that purpose. The complex took its present form in the 1620s, when a gatehouse and a stone well-head completed the ensemble. Bombing in 1945 destroyed a three-wing, four-storey building, whose outline is now traced by low walls and steel fencing.

The surviving wings house military and archaeological museums. Most unexpectedly, a Romanesque tympanum from Ołbin Abbey, thought lost, was discovered here in 1962.