Duke Boleslaw I the Tall, the eldest son of Wladyslaw II of Poland, had spent years in German exile and returned to Lower Silesia in 1163 with a Cistercian habit of mind. He invited monks from Pforta Abbey on the Saale - now in Thuringia - to settle on a forested bend of the Oder near a ford. Construction began in 1163; the first complex was complete by 1175 when Boleslaw issued the official foundation charter at Grodziec Castle. The Cistercians were the medieval Catholic Church's land-development specialists, and Lubiaz did what Cistercian abbeys always did: drained the swamps, introduced three-field crop rotation, planted vineyards, attracted German settlers, and turned wilderness into agricultural rent. By 1202 the monastery owned 27 villages. By the fourteenth century it was the cultural and economic capital of Silesia. Lubiaz - or, as it was known in German for most of its history, Kloster Leubus - became the founding house of Cistercian Silesia, eventually establishing six daughter monasteries across Polish lands.

The good times ended in 1428 when the Hussite armies swept into Silesia. Lubiaz was a Catholic center and an obviously rich one, and the Hussites pillaged it thoroughly. The decline that followed lasted nearly two centuries - through the Reformation, through the loss of Protestant villages to the Duchy of Legnica, through repeated wars and lootings. What rebuilt Lubiaz was the Counter-Reformation. From the 1670s, abbots Freiberger and Johann Reich oversaw an enormous Baroque reconstruction that tore down most of the medieval monastery and replaced it with the complex visible today: the Prelature (1681-1699), the Convent Wing (1692-1710), and finally the immense main facade. Michael Willmann painted 14 large altarpieces for the church between the 1680s and his death in 1706. The Prince's Hall, completed in 1738, has a 360-square-meter ceiling fresco by Christian Philipp Bentum that is one of the largest in Poland - putti, Habsburg portraits, the marriage of Maria Theresa to Francis I, the founding Boleslaw, all assembled in glorification of monastery and monarchy together.

Frederick the Great's Prussia took Silesia in 1742 and finally dissolved Lubiaz after the secularization of 1810. The buildings were used as a military hospital and then as a psychiatric asylum until 1942. That year, Telefunken established research laboratories in the abbey for the development of radar receivers, and a company called Schlesische Werkstatten Dr. Furstenau set up an armaments factory using forced labor from German-occupied Luxembourg. The Luxembourg laborers built engines for V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic rockets in halls where Cistercian monks had once sung the Office. They lived under conditions designed to consume them - some were murdered on site, others deported to concentration camps when their labor was no longer needed. In 1985 a commemorative plaque was unveiled to remember the Luxembourg forced laborers who died at Lubiaz. The factories were evacuated on 25 January 1945 ahead of the advancing Red Army. The buildings themselves were never bombed - they survived the war intact, which is why the Baroque shells still stand.

The Red Army arrived in 1945 and quartered soldiers in the empty complex. They set up a psychiatric hospital. The damage done in the postwar years was, in some ways, worse than what the war itself had done: interior decorations were defaced, wooden choir stalls and altars were burned for firewood, crypts were robbed for valuables. Of all the burials in the abbey crypt - centuries of bishops, abbots, dukes - only one set of remains can still be identified, the mummy of the painter Michael Willmann. The rest were disturbed and ended up in a pile. When the Soviets withdrew in 1950, the abbey simply sat. The Polish communist government had no interest in restoring a monument to Catholicism and Ostsiedlung; the buildings decayed for forty more years. After 1989 the Fundacja Lubiaz took ownership and began slowly restoring what could be saved. The Prince's Hall reopened to visitors in 1996. The roofs were finally replaced. The main facade is being restored from north to south, slowly. Michael Jackson briefly toured the monastery after a 1997 concert and reportedly considered buying it; the buyer eventually wanted it as a luxury hotel. Most of the 300 rooms remain empty. Concerts and the SLOT Art Festival raise money. Visitors can see the great rooms but not the ruined ones. The longest abbey facade in the world is still being put back together.