Jelenia Góra Town Trail · the long route · Cieplice

Gallery and Spa Animation Theatre

These two joined buildings hold the whole history of spa entertainment. First the Gallery – a social club modelled on an ancient villa, with a reading room, a games salon and a cigar lounge. Then the court theatre, where for the first five years plays were staged for the owners alone, and where titled spa guests and the Schaffgotsches themselves took part in the performances. Today the same building plays above all for children.

The Gallery: a club nobody would build today

The Gallery was raised in 1797–1800, founded by the Schaffgotsches, on the model of an ancient villa. The name misleads – this was not a picture gallery but a social club, and a very precisely programmed one.

Under one roof were a concert hall, a reading room, a games salon, a cigar lounge and a restaurant. The last of them is still running, which for a two-hundred-year-old building is rare. The other rooms say what people came to the waters for: the cure took the morning, and the rest of the day had to be filled somehow – with conversation, cards, a newspaper, music.

Who designed it is disputed. Every source gives the name Geissler, but one calls him an architect from Berlin, another from Wrocław, and the board by the building gives yet another first name. So I leave the surname alone – which seems more honest than picking one of the three versions.

A theatre where the patients acted

The theatre building was added in 1835–1836 on the initiative of Count Johann Nepomuk Schaffgotsch, to a design by Albert Tollberg. It is Classicist and intimate; the city brochure remarks tartly that its forms are “somewhat less noble than the Gallery's”.

The most interesting thing is who it was built for. For the first years it was a court theatre – performances were given for the owners and their guests. A wider audience was admitted only from 1840, and it was still an elite one.

And here is something the usual descriptions omit: titled spa guests and members of the Schaffgotsch family took part in the performances. This was not a theatre that a travelling company visited – it was a theatre that partly played to itself. Picture it in a house of some two hundred and seventy seats: a count on stage, and in the audience the people at whose table he had dined the evening before.

For the guests' convenience the two buildings were eventually joined by a connecting wing – you could walk from the club to the theatre without going outside. It is the same idea that gave the Long House its covered footbridge to the baths.

From court theatre to puppets

Today's occupant is the Spa Animation Theatre. The institution is a century and a half younger than the building: it was founded on 1 October 1976 as the Jelenia Góra Animation Theatre, and on 1 January 2009 it became independent and took its present name. Since 2022 its patron has been Bogdan Nauka, who ran the theatre from 1994 to 2020.

The repertoire is mostly plays for children and young people, so if you are here with a child, this is the one point on the trail where you can spend an afternoon instead of a quarter of an hour.

The building went through a thorough modernisation – the board says 2008–2011, other sources speak of an extension begun in 2007 – and gained new backstage facilities. The auditorium, with a single balcony, now seats up to two hundred.

The park, or the rest of the programme

The buildings stand in the Spa Park, and the park is older than they are: it was laid out as early as 1713, on the basis of an ordinary kitchen garden. In 1796 the main avenue was formed and planted with limes and maples; in 1819 the palace garden was arranged in the French manner, and in 1838 it was remodelled in the English style.

One decision of Schaffgotsch's says more about the age than all the rest: the park was divided into a castle part, open only to the residents of the palace, and a spa part – for everyone else. The border ran between those who lived here and those who had come here.

Today the park covers more than 16 hectares. Maples, sycamores, small-leaved limes and pedunculate oaks grow in it, and among the introduced species red oaks and Douglas firs. In the bandstand, where an orchestra once played for the spa guests, concerts are still held.

What you can see

You can look at both buildings from outside at any time, and the park is open to all. The simplest way to see the theatre inside is to buy a ticket for a performance – and that is the best route here, because the hall is intimate and you take it in at a glance.

The restaurant in the Gallery has been running without a break for over two hundred years, so coffee in this place is not a marketing trick but a continuation of the building's original function.

In front of the theatre stands Lalkarz, the puppeteer – a little deer with a marionette in his hooves, one of the figurines of the Deer Trail. It would be hard to find a better address.

At this site the strip listing the neighbouring trail points is missing, though other buildings have one. So if you are walking the route and looking for a hint where to go next – the next point is the Norwegian Pavilion, about two hundred metres across the park.