Plac Strzelecki, Wrocław

Plac Strzelecki is a Nadodrze square centred on Skwer Sybiraków and its memorial to Siberian deportees. Its name recalls the municipal shooting range that once stood here, while the surrounding layout developed from eighteenth-century meadowland into an independent square in eighteen seventy-six.

Plac Strzelecki is a Nadodrze square built around the green Skwer Sybiraków. At its centre stands the Monument to Siberian Deportees: a twelve-metre Latin cross forcing its way through a wall, made in remembrance of people deported to Siberia. The name of this place preserves an unexpectedly practical past.

Both Plac Strzelecki and its former German name, Schießwerder Platz, refer to the municipal shooting ground that once occupied this area. In the middle of the eighteenth century, gardens lay beside today’s Bishop Thomas the First and Ptasia streets, while the future square was meadowland behind them. By about eighteen sixty, its eastern side belonged to the nearby horse-market square, now Plac Stanisława Staszica.

The square became a separate place in eighteen seventy-six, laid out as a long, uneven rectangle with greenery in the middle. Its northern and southern edges filled with tenement houses from the eighteen-forties through the eighteen-nineties. The square was renewed in twenty eleven, adding a children’s playground and a recreation area. Even the name of Kurkowa Street, running from the square, recalls the shooting society and range that gave this neighbourhood its identity.