Before 1945 there is no separate history to tell: everything that happened to Görlitz happened here. A settlement called Goreliz appears in a document of the German king Henry IV in 1071, in the region of Upper Lusatia. It grew rich on the Via Regia, the great east-west trade road, and from 1346 it was the wealthiest member of the Six-City League alongside Bautzen, Kamenz, Lubań, Löbau and Zittau. Sovereignty changed hands the way it does in Central Europe: the Margraviate of Meissen, then Poland under Bolesław the Brave from 1002, back to Meissen in 1031, Bohemia from 1075, the Piast duchy of Jawor in 1319, Hungary under Matthias Corvinus in 1469, Bohemia again in 1490. The Congress of Vienna handed the whole thing to Prussia in 1815, which filed it under the Province of Silesia. The east bank was the poorer, newer, more industrial side.

On 26 August 1939, days before the invasion of Poland, the Germans opened a temporary camp on the eastern outskirts. It became Stalag VIII-A, and the first 8,000 Polish prisoners of war arrived on 7 September. Polish civilians were held there too, including women - activists and members of the intelligentsia seized in the Intelligenzaktion, held in transit before deportation to forced labour or to the concentration camps. Prisoners of a dozen further nationalities followed. One of the French prisoners was the composer Olivier Messiaen, captured in June 1940, who wrote the Quatuor pour la fin du temps in the camp and performed it there on 15 January 1941 with three fellow prisoners: Henri Akoka on clarinet, Jean le Boulaire on violin, Étienne Pasquier on cello. Perhaps four hundred prisoners and guards heard it. In February 1945 the camp was evacuated on foot, and men who could not keep walking were shot. A memorial stands on the site.

Polish operation groups crossed on 10 to 12 May 1945 to secure the east bank, and Polish administration was formally installed on 21 May. On 2 June the military closed the bridge to stop Germans returning to their homes. Early on the morning of 21 June the roughly 8,800 Germans still living on the eastern side were ordered out of their houses. The people who replaced them had mostly been moved by force themselves, from the eastern provinces Poland had just lost to the Soviet Union - one displacement feeding another along the whole width of the continent. They inherited a town without a centre. The stations, the utilities, the public buildings and the market squares were all on the German bank, and the bridges had been blown up on the night of 7 May.

Then came the Greeks. The communist side lost the Greek Civil War in 1949, and Poland admitted thousands of partisans and their families; the largest group of them was settled in Zgorzelec, where empty German housing stood waiting. At its height the Greek community here ran into the thousands, with its own schools, a retirement home and a factory that employed its members. Most eventually went back to Greece. Roughly sixty people of Greek descent remain, which still makes this the largest Greek community in Poland - enough to have built the Orthodox church of Saints Constantine and Helen in 2002, to have twinned the town with Naousa in 1998, and to have kept an international Greek song festival running here every year since 1999. It is an odd sound to carry across a Lusatian river, and it has been carrying for three-quarters of a century.

On the Polish bank stands a vast domed hall built by the Germans as the Oberlausitzer Gedenkhalle, designed by Hugo Behr and opened by Kaiser Wilhelm II on 28 November 1902 to celebrate the emperors and the unification of Germany. On 6 July 1950 Otto Grotewohl and Józef Cyrankiewicz met inside it and signed the agreement recognising the Oder-Neisse line as the border between East Germany and Poland. The building is now the Miejski Dom Kultury, the municipal house of culture. Below it the old town bridge, destroyed at ten o clock on the night of 7 May 1945, reopened for pedestrians on 20 October 2004. Görlitz and Zgorzelec declared themselves a joint Europastadt in 1998, hold combined council sessions, and came second to Essen in the race to be European Capital of Culture for 2010. About 29,000 people live on the Polish side.