Wrocisław or Vratislav: where the city's name came from

The origin of the name Wrocław is not entirely clear, but it is most often linked to the name of Duke Wrocisław, once popular among Polish knights. The oldest records of the city's name come from the 11th-century chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg and take the forms "Wrotizlaensem" and "Wortizlava". A rival hypothesis links the name to the Czech duke Vratislav I, who died in 921 and is said to have ruled the stronghold for a time, and according to some researchers even founded it. The first unambiguous mention of the city dates from the year 1000, when a bishopric was established here. Later records show how the form of the name changed over the centuries: in 1133 "Vuartizlau" was recorded, in 1154 the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi listed the city among Polish strongholds in the form "-r(a)t(i)-slaba", and the Latin "Liber fundationis" from the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries contains the record "Wratislavia".

Breslau, or the German pronunciation of the Polish name

The German name of the city also derives from the same Slavic root, though its sound evolved along a different path. The first German record dates from 1175 and reads "Wrezlaue", while in 1201 the form "Wreczelaw" appears. The sound "w" gradually turned into "b", most likely because German-speaking residents found the original Slavic pronunciation difficult. Awareness of the name's Slavic origin nonetheless survived among Germans themselves as late as the 19th century: a Prussian document from 1819 records the city as "Breslau (polnisch Wraclaw)". After the end of the Second World War and the city's transfer to Poland, the name Wrocław was officially adopted in place of Breslau on 19 May 1946.

Who restored Polish names after 1945

The task of assigning and restoring Polish names to places in the territories that came within Poland's borders after the war fell to the Commission for the Establishment of Names of Localities and Physiographic Features, set up back in 1934 and reactivated in 1945. It was headed by the geographer Stanisław Srokowski, and its members included the linguists Kazimierz Nitsch, then president of the Polish Academy of Learning, Mikołaj Rudnicki from Poznań, and Witold Taszycki from Kraków. Between 1946 and 1951 the commission restored or established new Polish names for around 32,000 localities and 3,000 physiographic features, working through regional subcommittees covering, among other areas, Silesia, Western Pomerania, East Prussia and the Lubusz Land. Some names were restored on the basis of historical sources, while others were newly assigned, sometimes for political reasons or in honour of well-known figures. The naming of individual streets within Wrocław itself was already a matter for the local city authorities; the available sources do not specify the full membership or working procedure of this body, but the results of its decisions can still be seen today in the names of successive streets and squares.

Streets that are translations of German names

Some post-war street names were created by simply translating the German name into Polish. The best example is Świdnicka Street, one of the main streets of Wrocław's Old Town. It leads towards the town of Świdnica, which is why as early as the Middle Ages it was called "platea swidnicensis" (1303), and later "swidnische gassin" (1345). Before the war it operated as Schweidnitzer Gasse, and from around 1840 as Schweidnitzer Straße, and it was precisely this German adjective that was translated directly into the Polish Świdnicka. Residents colloquially called it "Schwo": this abbreviation, though used less often today, is itself a kind of trace of the old German name that has survived in the speech of Wrocław's residents.

Streets and squares that broke with the German past

Other names came about as a complete break with the German tradition. Today's Grunwaldzki Square was called Kaiserstraße before the war, and its central intersection of six streets was known as Scheitniger Stern. After 1945 the representative avenue was given a name referring not to the German past but to the Battle of Grunwald of 1410, one of the key events in Polish historical memory. The name of the Grunwaldzki Bridge over the Oder followed a similar path. The bridge, opened in 1910, was originally called Kaiserbrücke, bore the name Freiheitsbrücke between 1919 and 1933, and then reverted to its original imperial name. Only on 6 September 1947 was it given the Polish name Most Grunwaldzki (Grunwald Bridge), again referring to the victory over the Teutonic Knights rather than to the crossing's German origins.

A name changed once, restored once: traces of communist Poland

The post-war naming of Wrocław's streets was not settled once and for all. Świdnicka, even though its Polish name was a simple translation of the German one, also changed in later years: the southern section of the street briefly bore the name of the writer Aleksander Fredro, and the whole street was for a time called Stalingradzka, in honour of the Battle of Stalingrad, an important element of communist symbolism of the period. The name Świdnicka was restored in 1957, during the period of political thaw after 1956. This episode shows that the names of Wrocław's streets built up in layers several times over: beneath the German name lies the Polish translation, beneath that a Stalinist episode, and on top the name in use today. The available sources do not confirm a full list of streets renamed in Wrocław after 1989 as part of the country-wide decommunisation of place names; this is a topic that requires separate checking at source.