Plac Zgody, Wrocław

Plac Zgody is a small square centred on the former Summer Palace of the Bishops of Wrocław, now home to the Ethnographic Museum. The palace began life between seventeen thirty-two and seventeen thirty-seven, commissioned by Cardinal Philipp Ludwig von Sinzendorf. Its Baroque character is still the key to the scene: a compact residence set amid greenery rather than a grand episcopal complex.

The bishops stopped using it in seventeen fifty-one. Egmont Websky, a textile industrialist and civic official, bought the property in eighteen eighty and enlarged it; the square was once called Webskyplatz in his honour. From nineteen oh seven, the palace served as Wrocław’s registry office.

The building was badly damaged during the nineteen forty-five siege of Wrocław, then rebuilt in a simplified form between nineteen sixty-two and nineteen sixty-five. Since October two thousand four, it has housed the Ethnographic Museum. The square itself is younger than the palace.

It was laid out in nineteen oh eight after the old farm buildings were cleared away; those buildings had contained a chicory factory from eighteen oh three to eighteen eighty. The open green plot preserves breathing room around a building that has outlived several entirely different uses.