Old Town Hall

Address Sukiennice 14/15, 50-101 Wrocław

The Town Hall is the single most important piece of medieval civic architecture in Poland — a stepped sandstone block of late Gothic and Renaissance construction, built and rebuilt between the 13th and 16th centuries. The exterior is heavily ornamented with carved stone reliefs, including the famous astronomical clock on the east wall and an elaborate Renaissance gabled roof.

The interior is now part of the City Museum of Wrocław, with the soaring Great Hall (Sala Wielka), a Renaissance loggia, and a long cellar room (Piwnica Świdnicka, in operation as a beer cellar since 1273) below. Worth visiting both for the architecture and for the displays on the city's complex German-Polish-Bohemian history.

things to do sight architecture
A story
The Wrocław astronomical clock on the eastern façade dates to 1580 and uses a single iron hand to show the hour, the date, the month and the phase of the moon all at once. It survived the 1945 bombing intact, hidden behind sandbags by the city's curators in the last weeks of the war.