Plac Konstytucji 3 Maja, Wrocław

Plac Konstytucji 3 Maja is the small square beside Wrocław Główny station, and its name honours the Constitution of the Third of May. The green space and fountain make it feel like a pause in the dense streets around the railway. Yet this ground has been repeatedly remade.

It was laid out in 1856, when the suburbs were being reorganised, as land reserved for future trade. The planned square was meant to extend as far as today’s Tadeusz Kościuszko Street. A Jewish cemetery once occupied part of the site, giving the early square a triangular outline.

In 1909, a new street—an extension of today’s Dworcowa Street—cut through the cemetery; land on its eastern side was then added to the square. The remaining cemetery area was removed in 1938. Before the war, rental apartment houses enclosed the square; the surviving northern row still preserves part of that older streetscape.

After the war, long-distance coaches used the PKS Wrocław Centralny bus terminal here until 1994. The contemporary Silver Tower Center, with offices, hotel space, shops and underground parking, opened in October 2014. This modest patch of greenery therefore holds a compact record of commerce, loss, travel and redevelopment.