Jelenia Góra Town Trail · the short route

Town Hall and Town Hall Square

This town hall stands because the previous one fell down. On 28 February 1739 a strong gust brought down the walls of a tower neglected for decades – it damaged the building and crushed several people. The town got round to rebuilding only when the military command ordered it to. Today the building with its clocks and gilded eagle on the spire stands in the middle of the square, and by the door keeps watch the little stag Rajcuś, the second one placed on the Deer Trail.

Before this town hall

Jelenia Góra received its town charter in the second half of the thirteenth century and was laid out according to Magdeburg law: first the market square, then streets at right angles and blocks between them, which the burghers built up plot by plot. The first town hall was probably wooden and went up soon after the charter – nobody even knows in which part of the square.

A masonry one appeared around the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There may have been several reasons: frequent fires, the failed Hussite siege of 1427, but above all something very practical. In 1433 the burghers were given permission to demolish the castle on what is now Wzgórze Krzywoustego, and that meant a sudden abundance of dressed stone. The castle went into the town walls and into buildings, the town hall among them. So if you walk the city centre route down from the Grzybek tower, you are following exactly the road the building material took several centuries ago.

A tower that burned twice

The history of this place is essentially the history of one tower and successive attempts to save it.

In 1549 a great fire consumed the whole town, and the town hall tower with it; the flames burned out the timber structures inside and weakened the walls. It was rebuilt only twenty-one years later, in 1570. A quarter of a century after that, in 1594, a clock was installed and an hour bell hung. When lightning struck it in 1599 there was no damage, and in 1604 it was repaired.

The Thirty Years’ War changed everything. In October 1632 a band of marauders plundered the town hall, and on 19 July 1634 the building burned along with the documents kept in it. Only the part of the archive prudently moved out earlier to Chojnik Castle survived. The tower burned out a second time, and six years later its walls were further weakened by cannon fire during the bombardment of the town.

Thirty-six years of repairs and a tower without a roof

After the war the town set about repairs and kept at them from 1650 to 1686 – thirty-six years. But the detail that decided the building’s fate is this: the tower was probably left unroofed. For decades it stood open to rain, snow and frost, and water did its work in the joints and the masonry. In 1720 the damaged structure was partly secured, but that was not a rebuilding.

The bill came on 28 February 1739. A strong gust was enough: the tower walls came down, damaging the town hall and burying several people. A year later, as Prussian troops entered Silesia, a heap of rubble still lay in the middle of the square.

Rebuilt on military orders

The town was in no hurry – there was a war on and no money. Only in 1742 did the military command in Głogów order the authorities to clear the rubble and put up a new building. Work began a year later under the supervision of Dames, and the design was entrusted to the director general of building, Christoph Gottlieb Hedemann.

Fifty people from villages belonging to the town were hired to clear the site, together with fourteen masons whose task was to recover everything that could be used again. Part of the old town hall therefore went into the new one – its remains survive in the cellars.

The foundation stone was laid at the eastern corner on 14 June 1744, in the presence of the town councillors, the royal war counsellor Christoph von Masori, director Hedemann, the master masons Jentsch and Effner and the master carpenter Weidde. Throughout the building work the town hall’s functions were carried out in house number 33 on the square, which belonged to the mayor.

By 1747 the shell was standing. The order of events that year says a good deal about priorities: on 14 May the inn in the cellars opened, on 29 July the tower roof was crowned with an orb and a spire bearing the Prussian eagle, and only on 25 September was the building consecrated.

The executioner at the head of the procession

The opening on 25 September 1747 was recorded in the chronicles in enough detail to be reconstructed step by step. The ceremonies began at eight in the morning at the mayor’s house. An hour later a procession formed and moved to the square.

At its head walked the executioner Kühn, carrying a sword, with three assistants. Behind him the market warden Sturm, also with a sword and two assistants. Only then came the mayor, the councillors walking in threes, the judges, the treasurer and the town officials, among them the physician Süssenbach. For a town of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this was entirely natural: the executioner was a municipal official, and the sword an instrument of law, not of horror.

The swords carried in such processions – an executioner’s and a judge’s – were town property, and once public executions ceased they went into the town hall store, and from there, around 1914, to the Karkonosze Museum. Its collection today holds two executioner’s swords and one judge’s sword; which of them went in the procession that day is not known.

The rest of the day was filled with trumpets, drums, gunfire and speeches, and in the afternoon a dinner with toasts and artillery salutes. The town hall was hung with garlands, pictures of Prussian eagles and the town’s arms were placed in the windows, and in the evening the walls were lit with lanterns, six lamps set in every free window.

The clock and the bugle call

The finishing work dragged on for two more years. The tower clock started at noon on 13 November 1750, and from 16 November a bugle call sounded from the tower every hour. Under the eaves hung tablets with Latin inscriptions praising the Prussian king, and in 1796 – after two fires and one lightning strike in the history of this place – a lightning conductor was finally fitted.

The Seven Houses

At the beginning of the twentieth century, around 1910, the town bought and attached to the town hall the neighbouring houses to the east known as the Seven Houses – mentioned as early as the fourteenth century, and formerly holding an apothecary, a kitchen and the bread benches. Because a tram ran between them and the town hall, the buildings were joined by a covered link at first-floor level.

That is why the mass of the building stops being symmetrical here, and why the square has its characteristic arcades. The arcaded houses are today one of the most photographed views in the town, and the best proof that the square is not a stage set but an organism that grew up over centuries.

Neptune in the middle of the square

A few steps from the entrance stands the Neptune fountain. The figure was carved around 1730 by the local sculptor Joseph Anton Bechert for a merchant who had made his money in overseas trade – originally it adorned a suburban residence. It reached the square after 1828 and was set up on the site of the old town well.

A god of the seas in the middle of a mountain town is not a mistake but a boast: through the linen woven in these valleys, Jelenia Góra was connected to ports that nobody here had ever seen.

That makes two wells on one square – one turned into a fountain, the other kept under glass a few dozen metres away.

The well under the glass floor

In the first of the Seven Houses there survives a sixteenth-century well, at least twelve metres deep. It was found during renovation, and in 2000 it was excavated – fifteen hundred buckets of rubble came out of it, and in them pottery, glass and animal bones.

Today it is covered with a glass floor and lit from below. During opening hours you can walk in and simply stand over it, looking down into the place the square drew its water from before there were mains. It is one of those things that are easy to miss, because nothing announces them.

Trams that ran across the square

A tram line passed between the town hall and the Seven Houses. What is left of it is a piece of rail in the cobbles – easy to walk over without noticing.

The Jelenia Góra trams, known as the Hirschberger Thalbahn, started on 10 April 1897 and ran until 28 April 1969, that is for seventy-two years. A detail for those who like technical things: the network was first built to standard gauge and as early as 1899 was regauged to metre gauge. The tram went well beyond the town, among other places to Podgórzyn.

Another relic of that system is the tram car standing in front of the town hall, which now houses an information point. It is not often that the tourist information is itself an exhibit.

What you see today

The building is late Baroque: three storeys, eleven bays, with three-bay projections crowned by pediments and a tall mansard roof with dormers. In the middle rises a massive square tower ending in an octagonal cupola with clocks and an open lantern, and a gilded eagle sits on the spire. Giant-order pilasters accent the corners and the projections.

Inside, the year 1924 is worth remembering: the interiors were remodelled then, and the new decoration of the staircase and the council chamber was made by the sculptor Ernst Ruelke of the woodcarving school in Cieplice. That is the same Cieplice carving tradition from which the school making today’s little stags grew – craft from one district thus decorates the town hall and sets figurines along the whole trail.

Between 1975 and 1998, when Jelenia Góra was a provincial capital, the provincial authorities sat in the town hall and the municipality moved to ul. Sudecka. After the province was abolished the town got its building back.

What else is nearby

By the entrance stands Rajcuś, the second stag of the Deer Trail, unveiled on 3 February 2020 when the town hall reopened after renovation – his story is on the list of stags. A few steps away is the basilica, and the route leads from here to the Wojanowska Gate and onwards to the Karkonosze Museum, where the swords from the opening procession are kept.

This is where the stags stand thickest in the whole town: Rajcuś and Przewodniczek right by the town hall, a dozen metres from the door, and Italjan not quite a hundred metres away.

Frequently asked questions

How old is the town hall in Jelenia Góra? The present building was put up between 1744 and 1747 to a design by Christoph Gottlieb Hedemann. It was consecrated on 25 September 1747.

What happened to the old town hall? On 28 February 1739 the walls of its tower, neglected for decades, collapsed. The disaster damaged the building and buried several people. Remains of the old town hall survive in the cellars of the present one.

Why did the rebuilding take so long? The town only began after the military command in Głogów ordered it to in 1742. Before that there was a war on and no money.

What are the Seven Houses? The arcaded houses adjoining the town hall to the east, mentioned as early as the fourteenth century and attached to the town hall around 1910. They form one of the most recognisable views in the town.

Was a bugle call played from the tower? Yes. From 16 November 1750, three days after the clock was started, a bugle call sounded from the tower every hour.

Can you go inside the town hall? Yes, during opening hours. In the first of the Seven Houses there is a sixteenth-century well under a glass floor – you can stand over it and look down.

What is the tram in front of the town hall? A car from the old Jelenia Góra tram network, now an information point. The trams ran here from 1897 to 1969, and a fragment of track survives between the town hall and the Seven Houses.

Which stag stands by the town hall? Rajcuś, unveiled on 3 February 2020 – the second on the Deer Trail.