Qualla: Gorzów Wielkopolski

Gorzów Wielkopolski: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MOs810, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 30 May 1945 the town was officially named Kobylagóra - Mare Mountain. Five weeks later it was Gorzów nad Wartą. Not until 5 November 1946 did the Polish naming commission settle on Gorzów Wielkopolski, and by then the place had already changed its country, its language and nearly every person in it. For the previous seven centuries it had been Landsberg an der Warthe, a Brandenburg market town on the river, and before that it had been a Piast fort guarding the point where the little Kłodawka runs into the Warta. Kobylagóra survives today as the name of a street. It is not a bad monument: a city where even the name had to be argued over from scratch.

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Image: MOs810 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gorzów Wielkopolski: The Fort at the Confluence

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mogo1987, Public domain. Under the first Polish monarchs of the Piast dynasty there was a craft and trade settlement at the meeting of the two rivers, defended by a fort, and until the mid-thirteenth century this was the edge of Greater Poland. Then in 1249 the Silesian duke Bolesław II Rogatka sold Lubu...

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Image: Mogo1987 | Public domain

Gorzów Wielkopolski: The Exchange

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michał Obiegło, Public domain. The Second World War came to Landsberg as an administrative fact before it came as a battle. The Germans ran nine forced labour camps in the town and four labour detachments of the Stalag III-C prisoner-of-war camp, holding French, Italian and Soviet captives - men worked hard an...

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Image: Michał Obiegło | Public domain

Gorzów Wielkopolski: Red Brick, and What Was Rebuilt Around It

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LechitaPL, CC BY-SA 4.0. The survivor is the cathedral. Gorzów's Gothic church of the Virgin Mary, built in red brick at the end of the thirteenth century, still holds the old market square while almost everything around it dates from after 1945. The centre is largely Communist-era construction, though m...

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Image: LechitaPL | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gorzów Wielkopolski: Papusza's City

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bar10der81, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bronisława Wajs, known by her Romani name Papusza, lived in Gorzów and became the best-known Romani poet in Polish literature - a woman who taught herself to read in a culture that had little use for writing, and who paid for her fame with the suspicion of her own community. Her ...

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Image: Bar10der81 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gorzów Wielkopolski: The Warta Side

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Crash override83, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gorzów calls itself the city of parks and gardens and has the acreage to back it up, from the central Park of Roses to the hilltop lookout in Siemiradzki Park, which opens onto the plains and forests running south. Down at the water, the renovated embankment has become the city's...

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Image: Crash override83 | CC BY-SA 4.0