Fontanna Niedźwiadek, Wrocław

Pressed against the Old Town Hall’s southern wall, Fontanna Niedźwiadek is the Bear Cub Fountain, a rebuilt version of a fountain that stood here before the war. Notice the bear poised on its cut tree trunk, with its compact shape made for a close encounter rather than a grand civic display. Ernst Moritz Geyger made the original cast in bronze in nineteen oh two; it was installed beside the town hall on the seventeenth of August nineteen oh four, and water flowed from the animal’s mouth into a stone basin.

During the Second World War, the statue disappeared. The present sculpture came from an effort begun by Maciej Łagiewski and Wrocław’s Shooting Fraternity. Ryszard Zamorski recreated it to match the vanished work, and the fountain returned here on the eighteenth of June nineteen ninety-eight.

This replacement is substantial: the sculpture is a metre and a half tall and weighs two hundred and seventy kilograms. A playful creature at the base of the hall now carries a story of loss, memory, and deliberate restoration.