In connection with the academic conference devoted to the Napoleonic era, which will be held in Bolesławiec on 9 September, it should be emphasized that we are one of the cities associated with the history of the Emperor of the French. This fact is worth using to promote the region.
The city is closely connected with the history of the Napoleonic Wars. Here you can find perfectly preserved buildings that bear witness to Bonaparte’s visits to Bolesławiec. We also have the well-equipped new City History Department at the Museum of Ceramics on Kutuzowa Street, as well as other monuments associated with the era. A visit to Bolesławiec is a real treat for connoisseurs and Bonapartists.
Napoleon Bonaparte first appeared in Bolesławiec on the night of 16 July 1807, on his way back to France after the conclusion of the Peace of Tilsit (a peace treaty between France, Russia and Prussia, which, among other things, decided on the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw). In total, he visited our city five times, and it became one of the important points during the Napoleonic Wars.
We have two buildings where Bonaparte stayed: the hotel and inn “Under the Black Eagle” on Prusa Street (the tenement at number 2), and the house of the merchant Ernst Jenke (now a tenement building in the Market Square housing the Agora bookshop). Other monuments also recall the Napoleonic era: the monument—an obelisk to Mikhail Kutuzov (the work of outstanding artists of the Neoclassical era, K. F. Schinkel and G. Schadow, from 1819) and the 1814 monument to Kutuzov, standing in the cemetery named after him (it was placed at the site reached by Kutuzov in pursuit of Napoleon, from which he had to turn back because of illness).
Anyone wishing to return to those distant times should be sure to visit the permanent exhibition at the Museum of Ceramics on Kutuzowa Street, reopened after renovation. It contains meticulously and professionally prepared rooms devoted to the Napoleonic era. The exhibition makes it possible to imagine what the interior of the bourgeois house where Napoleon Bonaparte was a guest looked like.
That is why the academic conference devoted to the Grand Army in Silesia, organized in our city, is deeply meaningful. The Museum of Ceramics invites you on Wednesday, 9 September, at 4:00 p.m., to the Councillors’ Hall in the Town Hall; admission is free.
The conference will discuss the period of the Napoleonic battles of 1813. The speakers will include historians from the University of Wrocław and a guest from the Saint Petersburg State University of History, Professor Paweł Krotow.
The information above was written in cooperation with the Museum of Ceramics. Information about monuments from the Napoleonic era comes from the publication “In the Footsteps of Famous Europeans” by Anna Bober-Tubaj.
(information: Grażyna Hanaf)