The deer legend – how Jelenia Góra got its name

Long ago, before a single house stood in this valley, the whole region was covered by wild, trackless forest. They say Duke Bolesław III Wrymouth – a great lord and an ardent hunter, undeterred by dense woods or steep Karkonosze slopes – once rode here to hunt.

Among the trees he spotted a stag such as he had never seen: huge, its coat red as copper, its antlers spread wide like a crown. The duke drew his bow and loosed an arrow – but the beast, though struck, did not fall. It bolted and fled deep into the forest, and Bolesław, forgetting the whole world, gave chase.

He raced through thickets and streams, ever farther and higher, until his retinue was left far behind. At last, breathless, he spurred his horse to the top of a wooded hill – and there the stag vanished from his sight, as if dissolving into the mist. The duke was alone.

But when he raised his eyes, he forgot the hunt. From the summit opened a view he had never known: a green river valley, and beyond it a wall of mountains reaching the clouds, the highest snow-capped dome on the horizon. The place was so beautiful and so well-suited – high, safe, with water and forest all around – that Bolesław resolved: here, where he had run down the wondrous stag, a stronghold would rise.

And so it came to pass. From that hunt and that red stag the settlement took its name – in German Hirschberg, „deer mountain". And because the deer had led the duke to this place, it was set forever in the coat of arms: red and proud, on three green hills, with three golden acorns in its mouth.

So the legend tells. And though the chronicles tell the story differently, the deer remained the city's sign – and today its small bronze counterparts, the little deer, have scattered once more across Jelenia Góra, like the offspring of that single stag that gave the city its name centuries ago.