plac Ludwika Zamenhofa, Wrocław

Plac Ludwika Zamenhofa is a fenced green square in Huby, part of Wrocław’s Krzyki district, rather than a grand civic piazza. Within its compact area, you find a children’s miniature road-safety town alongside a playground. The space covers only three-tenths of a hectare, and its near-triangular plan once gave it the name Plac Trójkątny, or Triangle Square.

The present name, adopted on the twenty-third of June nineteen sixty-one, honours Ludwik Zamenhof. He was an ophthalmologist, born in Białystok in eighteen fifty-nine and dead in Warsaw in nineteen seventeen, who created the Esperanto language. That international ambition makes an unexpected counterpart to this intensely local place, designed for children learning the rules of the street.

Its successive names trace Wrocław’s changing twentieth-century history: it was Kantplatz until the eighth of August nineteen thirty-three, then Göringplatz until nineteen forty-five, before becoming Plac Trójkątny. Kamienna, Łódzka and Wieczysta streets frame the square, while the miniature streets inside give this small patch of greenery its distinctive identity.