Wroclaw Audio Tours

Wroclaw has been Polish, Bohemian, Habsburg, Prussian, and German, and it carries evidence of all of them simultaneously. After 1945, when it was handed back to Poland under the post-war border realignment, the entire German population was expelled and replaced with Poles displaced from Lwow (now Lviv) in Ukraine. New people in old buildings in a renamed city: Wroclaw's identity was rebuilt as deliberately as its streets, and what emerged is one of Central Europe's most architecturally varied and culturally alive cities.

Cathedral Island, Ostrow Tumski, is the oldest part of the city, a quiet enclave of Gothic churches and gas lamps on an island in the Oder River.

The area still uses gas street lighting, switched on by a lamplighter each evening, and at dusk it feels genuinely medieval in the best possible sense. A short walk brings you to the Rynek, the main market square, with its brightly painted merchant houses and the impressive Gothic city hall at its centre. Look carefully at the facades: many are reconstructions, rebuilt from wartime rubble with pre-war photographs as reference.