Olsztyn Audioguides

From 1516 to 1521, Nicolaus Copernicus administered the castle at Olsztyn for the Warmia cathedral chapter, and when Teutonic Knights besieged the city in 1520 he organized its defense successfully. During those years, working out the details of what would eventually become his heliocentric theory, Copernicus scratched an astronomical table directly into the plaster of the castle cloister wall. It is the only surviving astronomical instrument he made with his own hands, and it remains there today in the same corridor where he worked.

The city was founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1348 as Allenstein, and after the Partitions of Poland in 1772 it became thoroughly German, returning to Poland only in 1945 after World War II.

The transition was violent and complete: the German population fled or was expelled, and Polish settlers, many displaced from Lwow and Wilno in the east, moved into a city they had to rebuild and make their own. The result is a place with medieval Teutonic architecture, a Polish identity formed within living memory, and a castle courtyard bearing the actual handwriting of the astronomer who moved the Earth.