Iglica, Wrocław

Iglica, also called the Little Spire, is the granite monument rising from a stepped base in Plac Solny. Its rippling obelisk shape was designed to evoke a flame, and it has stood here since nineteen ninety-six. Wrocław sculptor Adam Wyspiański designed it, yet the monument carries no inscription explaining its purpose.

That silence makes its subject all the more striking. The flame recalls the medieval killing by burning of Jews accused of harming Christians at this very square. Another interpretation connects it with the fifteenth century, when the Franciscan preacher John of Capistrano stirred Wrocław’s townspeople with fiery sermons.

They brought out furniture, clothes, and other possessions judged too lavish, then burned them here in Plac Solny. Before this slender memorial arrived, the same site held a monument to Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher from eighteen twenty-seven until nineteen forty-four. Iglica’s nickname distinguishes it from the far larger spire outside Centennial Hall. This small, wavering form turns a difficult history into something deliberately hard to overlook.