Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Wrocław

Biblioteka Uniwersytecka is the principal library of the University of Wrocław. Founded through the union of several historic collections, it retains legal-deposit status and much of its wartime-surviving holdings. Its present main building opened in January two thousand twelve after construction began in two thousand three.

Biblioteka Uniwersytecka is the University of Wrocław’s principal library, and this is its newer main home on Joliot-Curie Street. Its story begins in the early nineteenth century, when several older collections were brought together: the books of the Jesuit Leopoldina, the Viadrina University library from Frankfurt on the Oder, former Silesian monastic libraries taken over in secularisation, and older grammar-school holdings. The institution formally became the Royal University Library in eighteen fifteen, with the classical philologist Johann Gottlob Schneider as its first director.

The library’s first base occupied a former monastery on Piasek Island. In eighteen twenty-four it gained the right to receive a copy of every publication subject to legal deposit, a privilege held by only seventeen libraries in Poland. During the Second World War, its most valuable material was sent out of Wrocław, yet much of the collection survived the bombing of nineteen forty-five.

This building was designed by a Warsaw architectural team led by Jacek Rzyski. Construction began in two thousand three; the building received permission for use on the fifteenth of December two thousand eleven and opened officially the following January. The move here continued in stages, including more than two hundred twenty-five thousand volumes transferred in two thousand fourteen.