Every design for Legnica

At the Zamek Piastowski w Legnicy, one of the largest castles in Poland, you are standing in the city that the Piast dynasty ruled longer than any other – for seven centuries, until the last Piast duke, George William, died in 1675. Legnica appears in chronicles from 1004, though people lived here much earlier, and from 1248 it was the residence of the dukes of Legnica.

For many Poles the name stirs one memory above all: the battle at Legnickie Pole near the city on 9 April 1241, during the first Mongol invasion, when a Polish-led coalition was defeated. The city carries that history lightly today. It sits on the Kaczawa River and the Czarna Woda in the central part of Lower Silesia, is an economic, cultural and academic centre of Lower Silesia alongside Wrocław, and is the largest urban centre of the copper district, which the Muzeum Miedzi explains. Its architecture runs from early medieval to modern, from the Kamienice Śledziowe to the partly reconstructed Old Town.

On the map, the castle and the old streets around it are the outline of a childhood that for many Legnica people began right here.