The origins of Wrocław go back to a settlement that emerged at a convenient crossing on the River Odra and a junction of major old routes leading from the south of Europe to the north, towards the Baltic coast, and from the west to the east, towards the Black Sea.

In the first half of the 10th century, the area of Silesia came under Bohemian rule, and the settlement, at the time probably a fortified borderland outpost, was named after the Bohemian duke Vratislav.
In the last decade of the 10th century, Silesia became part of the Polish state.

In the year 1000, during the reign of Boleslaus the Brave, a papal bull established the town as the seat of a bishopric within the archbishopric of Gniezno. The bull is the earliest extant written record mentioning Wrocław.

During the so called Age of Fragmentation (1138–1320), when Poland was divided into autonomous principalities, Silesia and its main city became the domain of a new ducal lineage – the Silesian Piasts.
Numerous smaller settlements were established around the ducal city situated on the River Odra islands. In the early 13th century they all began to coalesce into a single urban organization. The process was accelerated by the Mongol raid of 1241, during which Wrocław itself was partly destroyed.
The rebuilt city was incorporated under Madgeburg Law. During that time a dominant position among the population of the city was gained by German settlers, who were encouraged to come to Silesia by the Silesian Piasts, who hoped that the newcomers would help develop the economy of their lands.
In the second half of the 13th century the city was already protected by a brick wall and a moat. Beginning in 1261 Wrocław had a municipal self-government body, the City Council, in accordance with the Magdeburg Law charter it had received.

Upon the childless death of the Piast Duke Henry in 1335, the city and the local duchies passed to Bohemian rule under earlier treaties.
The period of the rule of the house of Luxemburg was generally favourable for the development of the city, which was becoming an ever more important centre of commerce and crafts. Less beneficial for Wrocław and the whole of Silesia was the period of the Hussite Wars and the subsequent prolonged fighting over the Bohemian succession following the extinction of the Luxemburg dynasty.
Finally, upon the death of the Bohemian King Louis Jagiellon in 1526, Wrocław and the rest of Silesia fell to the Habsburgs. That was also the end of efforts to restore Polish supremacy over Silesia.
At the turn of the 15th into the 16th century, the affluent and sprawling city undertook the construction of modern fortifications, appropriate for the approaching age of firearms.

A sermon by Johannes Hess at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in 1523 marked the arrival of reformation in Wrocław, where it met with favourable response: just a year later most of the population of the city, led by the City Council, had embraced Protestantism. Only the churches and abbeys on Ostrów Tumski (Cathedral Island) and some of the nearby settlements remained Catholic. Protestantism continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant faith in the following centuries, even during the period of the Habsburgs attempts at re-Catholicization of Silesia in the first decades after the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The city also managed to avoid any major damage during the war by trying to maintain neutrality vis-à-vis the sides of the conflict.
In 1702 the Emperor Leopold I founded a Jesuit Academy in Wrocław, which was a two-faculty university.

As a result of the Silesian Wars, in 1741 Wrocław and Silesia fell under Prussian rule.
The people of Wrocław greeted the troops of Frederick II enthusiastically. The Prussian king soon turned the conquered province into an ‘armoury’ of the kingdom and Wrocław into a fortress and one of the three capital cities of Prussia. At the same time, the Prussian centralist policies deprived the city of its municipal self-rule, which it had enjoyed since the Middle Ages. There was also a noticeable increase in taxation by the new rulers, only to a certain degree compensated for by efficient administration.

In January 1807 the city capitulated to Napoleon’s army, which had already defeated the Prussian troops in the field.
The French occupation was marked by the imposition of a heavy tribute and the demolition of the city fortifications. Thus, unwittingly the French contributed to the removal of a barrier to the expansion of the city following the Napoleonic Wars.
In the wake of far-reaching reforms of the state, after 1809 Wrocław, like other Prussian cities, gained modern municipal local government and opportunities for unhindered growth under conditions of a capitalist economy. The year 1811 saw the establishment of a state University of Wrocław, which would, however, only reach its greatest splendour at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century.

During the 19th century, especially during its final decades, the capital of Silesia became not only an important administrative, ecclesiastical, and military centre but also a major hub for transport, manufacturing (especially machinery and garment production), trade, culture, and research.
Following the opening of the first stretch of a railway line (Wrocław–Oława) in 1842, the city gradually evolved into a significant rail and road transport junction and, upon the completion of major canalization works on the Odra and the construction of docks at Pöpelwitz (Popowice) in the late 19th / early 20th century, a major water transport hub. The city kept expanding, its infrastructure constantly enlarged and modernized, existing structures upgraded or replaced, and new ones built. Horse trams came into use in 1877 and remained in service until 1910; beginning in the 1890s, as the electrification of the city progressed, they were gradually replaced with electric trams.
At the turn of the century, Wrocław had a vibrant and accomplished academic community. In addition to the University of Wrocław, which already in the early 20th century boasted several Nobel Prize winners among its faculty, a Technical College was founded in 1910, followed by an Academy of Fine Arts the year after. Its theatrical and musical life and, to a certain extent, the fine arts, made Wrocław one of the leading cultural centres of Germany.

The first decades of the 20th century saw the execution of outstanding and trailblazing architectural concepts (e.g. the Centennial Hall). The increasing importance of the ever more affluent borderland city was reflected in the growing number of foreign diplomatic missions established here: In 1914 there were as many as 20 of them.
The population of the city was half a million.

During World War I, Wrocław, which was behind the frontline zone, avoided damage, though not the impoverishment of its population and its economy. After the war, new economic problems were brought about by Germany’s territorial losses to the reborn Poland, resulting in the shrinking of the direct hinterland of the city. During the first two post-war years, Wrocław was also the scene of rather dramatic events to do with the emergence of a new political order in Germany.
When the political and economic situation in Germany became stable again in the second half of the 1920s, Wrocław got back on the path of development and modernization. Between 1924 and 1928 the city considerably enlarged the area within its administrative borders. It also gradually regained its position of a commercial and cultural centre. The satellite residential districts of Pöpelwitz/Popowice, Zimpel/Sępolno, Bischofswalde/Biskupin, Pilsnitz/Pilczyce, Mochbern/Muchobór, Siedlung Leedeborn/Grabiszynek, and Tschansch/Księże, built with a view to relieving the overpopulated inner suburbs are now considered very well designed and innovative. After 1929 the development of the city was brought to a halt by a massive economic crisis.

From 1933 onwards, the industrial and infrastructural investments of the Nazi authorities brought about economic recovery and a marked drop in unemployment in the city, like in the rest of Germany, but at the same time the autonomy of the city was significantly limited. Wrocław was developing as a cog in the machine of Hitler’s Germany arming itself for the conquest of the world. Cultural and academic life was considerably restricted. Political opponents and the Jewish population faced ever increasing oppression that eventually led to extermination.
During World War II, until 1944 Wrocław remained outside the area of direct military operations and even became a place where several hundred thousand civilians evacuated from further inside Germany and numerous munitions factories found refuge. Towards the end of 1944 the number of people in the city was close to a million.
In the face of an approaching frontline in the east, Wrocław was designated a closed fortress, Festung Breslau, in 1944. In January 1945 the commanders of the fortress ordered an evacuation of civilians, which amidst an unusually harsh winter and a shortage of means of transport would prove tragic in its consequences.

February 1945 saw the onset of a siege of the city by the Red Army. After nearly three months of fighting, Festung Breslau capitulated on 6 May 1945.
Most of its buildings, especially in the southern and western districts, were lying in ruins. Tens of thousands of the defenders of the city and civilians had died or suffered injuries.

A few days later the first representatives of the Polish administration began arriving in Wrocław. There followed a period of reconstruction of the devastated city, an influx of Poles, and expulsion of the German population, which was mandated by the agreement reached at the Potsdam Conference, where the decision was made to award Wrocław and Silesia to Poland and to resettle the German inhabitants. In the initial post-war years the Polish administration of the city operated side by side with Soviet military administration, whose policies were not always aligned with the Polish interests. In the autumn of 1945 the first administration offices, public transport lines, schools (the Polish University of Wrocław on 15 November), newspapers, cultural and sports institutions were already in place. Trade and services, still largely private, had also developed.

The Poles who moved to Wrocław mostly came from central Poland and the Poznań region. There was also a sizeable group of people from pre-war eastern Poland, especially from Lwów (today’s Lviv in Ukraine). Apart from the people, arrivals from Lwów included a part of the Ossolineum library collection, of great importance to the national culture, and the canvas of the Panorama of the Battle of Racławice.

When the communists had taken over full control of the state and, beginning in 1948, embarked on a programme of rigorous imposition of the communist system on the people, the state, and the economy, the symptoms and effects of those policies were felt with all their force in Wrocław too.

The communist authorities had an ambivalent attitude to Wrocław and all of the recently gained lands in the west and north.
On the one hand they took all the credit for regaining those territories for Poland and boasted of successes in their reconstruction and integration with the rest of the country. Wrocław was chosen for the organization of large-scale propaganda events, such as the Recovered Territories Exhibition (July 1948) and the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, attended by delegates from 46 countries.

On the other hand, for many years the industrial or materials resources of Wrocław were treated as a repository for central Poland. Even after such policies were limited in the late 1950s, capital construction projects in Wrocław were seldom among the state’s priorities. Some of the neglect of that period, e.g. in the sphere of transport infrastructure, continue to be felt to this day.
Towards the end of the 1950s, the city returned to its former population level and, despite restrictions and distortions due to the political and socio-economic conditions during the era of the Polish People’s Republic, gained the position of one of the main urban, economic, cultural, and academic centres of Poland. The local heavy industries (metallurgical, machine building, and means of transport) saw particularly significant expansion. The new generations of the city’s citizens increasingly moved to flats on newly built housing estates (although housing was constantly in short supply), from the 1970s onwards dominated by prefabricated-panel buildings.
Post-war Wrocław was among the youngest cities in Poland in terms of the average age of its inhabitants, with remarkably large numbers of pupils and students.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wrocław became one of Poland’s main cultural centres, known, among other things for its Wratislavia Cantans festival of oratorio and cantata music, the achievements of Henryk Tomaszewski’s Pantomima Theatre and Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratorium Theatre, the city’s visual arts community, and a vibrant student culture.

In August 1980, the employees of Wrocław’s factories and other establishments joined the general strike that had started in Poland and which led to the emergence of the Solidarity Trade Unions. Lower Silesia and Wrocław itself became one of the strongest bastions of Solidarity.
Even after the imposition of the oppressive martial law, Wrocław remained one of the staunchest centres of anti-communist opposition throughout the 1980s.
In June 1983 Wrocław was visited by Pope John Paul II during his pilgrimage to Poland. The mass he celebrated at the Partynice Horse Race Course was attended by nearly a million people, both residents of the city and visitors from other parts of Lower Silesia.
In 1985 the restored Panorama of the Battle of Racławice was made available for viewing by the public in Wrocław, for the first time since the war. It was displayed in a purpose-designed building and immediately became one of the main tourist attractions of the city.

In June 1989 the people of Wrocław turned out en masse to cast their votes in the first free elections to the Sejm and the Senate, which marked the beginning of a transformation of the political system that put Poland on the path to democracy and market economy, thus opening up new opportunities for the city, such as it had not had for decades.
May 1990 saw the first free local elections. A City Council was established with Professor Stanisław Miękisz as its first chairman. The Council elected Bogdan Zdrojewski mayor of Wrocław. One of the first decisions of the City Council was to restore the historical coat of arms of Wrocław, which was also an act of symbolic acceptance by the Polish population of the city of its entire history, including its German past.

Under the new conditions Wrocław, like the rest of the country, was undergoing transformations in virtually all possible spheres. In the economy, private entities quickly replaced former giant state-owned enterprises, most of which were either privatized or liquidated.

The structure of Wrocław’s industries has changed and is now dominated by automotive production, pharmaceuticals, and new technologies. Modernization of the city’s industrial base has been aided by the rapid development, since the mid 1990s, of higher education, which provides highly-skilled human resources.

Fast economic growth has been constrained by decades of infrastructural neglect in the city itself as well as in the region and the country. Since the early 1990s the municipal authorities have made great efforts to ensure that the city, one of the largest in Poland, gains the features of a metropolis. Wrocław is one of the leading Polish cities in terms of ability to attract foreign direct investment. That effort has been supported by ongoing thorough upgrading of the transport system. Projects underway to regenerate the city’s architectural resources.

Transformations taking place in Wrocław have been affecting not only the physical, but also the mental sphere – the consciousness of the inhabitants. They have been developing an ever stronger sense of identification with the city, which has become a meeting place for visitors from all over the world and the venue of large international events, such as the European Meeting of the Taizé Community (1993), the 46th International Eucharistic Congress attended by Pope John Paul II (1997), and the celebrations of the Wrocław Millennium (2000). Wrocław has also become a member of a number of international organizations and established ties with several partner cities in Europe and the Americas.

In September 2001 Bogdan Zdrojewski was succeeded as mayor of Wrocław by Stanisław Huskowski, replaced in November 2002 by Rafał Dutkiewicz, the first mayor of Wrocław to have been chosen by popular vote.

By Krzysztof Popiński