The town that was called Frankenstein for six centuries

From the second half of the 13th century, when the town was founded by Henry the Righteous, Duke of Wrocław, until 1945, Ząbkowice Śląskie bore the German name Frankenstein. It lay on the trade route linking Silesia with Bohemia and quickly gained economic importance, among other things thanks to the staple right for salt and lead it was granted as early as the 13th century. Today the town itself uses this association with a name known from horror literature in its tourism promotion, though, as we shall see below, the link with the novel is much looser than the names of local attractions might suggest.

Where the name actually came from

The name Frankenstein did not appear at once, and it does not refer to any "stone of the Franks", as a literal reading might suggest. According to accounts of the town's history, before a settlement under this name existed, two attempts were made to found settlements in the area that did not take hold: Przyłęk, known in German as Frankenberg, and Koziniec, known as Löwenstein. The town was founded halfway between them, as an organism meant to take over their trading function, and its name is said to have been formed by fusing the two earlier names, taking the first part of the name Frankenberg and the second part of the name Löwenstein. This etymological explanation appears in accounts of the town's history, though it is worth remembering that place names from several hundred years ago rarely have a single, fully certain explanation.

The notorious gravedigger trial of 1606

The darkest chapter in old Frankenstein's history is the trial of 1606. During a plague then raging in the town, the authorities accused the local gravediggers of digging up corpses, drying them and grinding them into a powder, which they were said to have scattered on the thresholds of residents' homes, deliberately spreading the disease. Charges of theft, desecration of corpses and witchcraft were added to this. Under torture, the accused confessed to everything, and several people were executed.

The contemporary historian Kamil Pawłowski, analysing the surviving trial documents, has however established a different course of events: the original reason for the gravediggers' arrest is said to have been ordinary drunkenness, and it was only in the course of the investigation that the case turned into a typical witch hunt, with forced confessions and a conviction. This revision does not change the fact that in Ząbkowice people really were executed on charges of crimes which, as it now appears, they did not commit in the form the indictment described.

What about Mary Shelley: facts and speculation

The coincidence between the town's name and the title character's surname from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" has fired the imagination of tourists and the creators of local attractions for years. It has to be said plainly, though: no source confirms that the author knew the history of the Silesian town or the gravedigger trial of 1606. This remains speculation, not an established fact.

Competing hypotheses about Shelley's inspiration point to entirely different trails, among them Frankenstein Castle on the Rhine in Germany, near which the writer stayed in 1814, four years before the novel was published, and, according to one of her biographers, also local legends about a certain Dippel, who is said to have experimented with reanimating corpses. Neither of these versions, the Silesian nor the Rhineland one, has the status of a confirmed certainty in research on the novel. The coincidence of names is nonetheless compelling enough that Ząbkowice Śląskie has for years built its tourist brand around it, among other things in the form of an exhibition called Dr Frankenstein's Laboratory, set up in the Regional Heritage Room, together with a room devoted to the history of the gravedigger trial.

The Leaning Tower and other traces of the old name in the town

The symbol of the town is the Leaning Tower, a structure tilted more than two metres from vertical. According to local sources, it is about 34 metres tall, and an inscription on it states that it was built by a certain Johannes Gleiss; it is not known today whether the tilt is the result of a construction error or of the earthquake in nearby Bardo in 1598. In other accounts of the town's history the same tower appears as a former bell tower from the 14th or 15th century, damaged in a fire in 1858 and not restored until 1964; sources therefore differ on the details of its history, but agree on the tilt itself and on the fact that it is one of the town's most recognisable landmarks. The tower stands on a street tellingly named Krzywa (Crooked), where the castle is also located: brick ruins of a Renaissance stronghold built in the 16th century on the site of an older, Gothic defensive castle.

Nearby, in neighbouring Ziębice, the former German Münsterberg, an even darker criminal case unfolded in 1924: the merchant Karl Denke was arrested there, having for years murdered beggars, homeless people and travellers, and goods made from the skin and bones of victims were found in his house. Denke hanged himself in his cell on the day of his arrest. The case has no direct connection to the name Frankenstein, but it is sometimes recalled alongside it as yet another dark episode in the history of the region around Ząbkowice Śląskie.