Day 17 Wroclaw

 What can I (Bo) say other than I love Wroclaw. It’s a colorful, vibrant city, young and joyful and full of life.  It’s changed a lot since my student days, but its essence is still the same. We stayed in Hotel Herbal, in the old town, close to Rynek. It’s a relatively new hotel housed in a former monastery. It is nice, but the rooms are very small.

 

We took an electric cart tour of the center, walked all over the city – sort of a sentimental tour, and finally found golabki for Phil. We sampled Mexican food, and spent the evening in the courtyard of the Jewish quarter by the White Stork Synagogue eating, drinking and talking.











 

I should mention a peculiar Wroclaw specialty – little gnomes or dwarfs. There are about 750 of them scattered all over the city. People hunt for them and take their pictures. I did too… not sure how many, but certainly not 750. The little gnomes are actually a nod to the Orange Alternative, an anti-Soviet resistance movement born in Wrocław that used dwarves as its symbol. Armed with spray cans and led by an artist at the University of Wrocław named Waldemar ‘Major’ Fydrych, the group peacefully protested the government’s censorship during the period of martial law from 1981 to 1983 by defacing communist propaganda with surrealist-inspired street art – specifically, paintings of mischievous little gnomes. In 2001, the city decided to commemorate its history of artistic anti-communist rebellion by placing a bronze statue of a large dwarf – named Papa Dwarf – on Świdnicka street, where members of the Orange Alternative used to gather. Four years later, a local sculptor named Tomasz Moczek had an idea to create tiny bronze dwarves, each representing a different part of Wroclaw’s history or daily life and place them around the city. That was the start…

















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