Dworzec Wrocław Główny, Wrocław

Wrocław Główny is Wrocław’s principal railway station and Poland’s busiest by passenger numbers. Built in the mid-nineteenth century to designs by Wilhelm Grapow, it grew from a single-platform terminus into a major rail hub. The station also preserves memories of wartime resistance and actor Zbigniew Cybulski.

Wrocław Główny is the city’s main railway station, a vast nineteenth-century gateway whose busy routes tie Lower Silesia to the rest of Poland and beyond. The present station was built between eighteen fifty-five and eighteen fifty-seven to replace the earlier Upper Silesian station. Wilhelm Grapow, architect to the royal Upper Silesian Railway, designed it when this was still the city’s southern edge, beyond the built-up streets.

Notice the long front building: its English Neo-Gothic manner revives the pointed, decorative architecture associated with Tudor England. The first station had only one platform, but its covered hall stretched about two hundred metres and ranked among Europe’s largest railway structures of its day. Expansion began in eighteen ninety-nine, adding five platforms and a great roof over four of them.

This is also a place of memory. On the twenty-third of April nineteen forty-three, the Polish resistance group Zagra-Lin struck a Nazi troop train here. Platform three commemorates actor Zbigniew Cybulski, who died there in nineteen sixty-seven after attempting to board a departing train. After a major renewal for Euro twenty twelve, the station served twenty-nine point four million passengers in twenty twenty-three—more than any other railway station in Poland.