Every design for Oleśnica

Oleśnica is famed for its ducal castle, whose arcaded inner courtyard is counted among the finest Renaissance work in the region. Around it lies a town on the Oleśnica river, a tributary of the Widawa, out on the Silesian Lowlands east of the Trzebnickie Hills, thirty kilometres north-east of Wrocław. Even the name grows out of the landscape: it comes from olsza, the alder that lined the water.

The place has a calm, bookish feel, fitting for a town that was once a notable centre of Polish printing and kept its own gymnasium and press. Biblioteka łańcuchowa, the only surviving chained library in Central Europe, carries that memory, while Brama Wrocławska still marks the old way in from the road to Wrocław. For more than five centuries Oleśnica was the capital of its own small principality, and that independent streak lingers in the Mauzoleum Wirtembergów and in the quiet streets of Centrum.

Anyone who has walked through the arcades of Zamek Książąt Oleśnickich knows why it belongs on the map you wear: it is the shape of the whole town in a single courtyard.