A city ordered from an architect
Jan Zamoyski was chancellor and grand hetman of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and he had studied in Padua. He wanted a town of his own built on Italian principles, on the trade route running from Lublin to Lviv. He issued the founding charter in 1580 and commissioned the design from Bernardo Morando, an architect brought in from Italy who settled here for good and served for a while as mayor. Because of its founder's Paduan education, Zamość has long been nicknamed the Padua of the North.
Morando's plan is usually described as anthropomorphic: the Zamoyski palace as the head, Grodzka Street crossing the market square as the spine, the side streets as arms, and the bastions as limbs for defence. Two smaller squares, the Salt Market and the Water Market, stood in for internal organs. It sounds like a treatise, but an hour on foot is enough to verify it: every street meets at a right angle, and the whole body sits inside a heptagon.
The Great Market and the arcades
The Great Market is a square 100 metres on each side — smaller than Kraków's, but complete and fully enclosed. Nothing stands in the middle of it: the town hall was pushed into the northern row so that it would not block the view towards the palace. Mannerist and Baroque, rebuilt several times, it carries an octagonal clock tower some 52 metres high and a wide fan-shaped staircase added in the eighteenth century, now the town's unofficial emblem.
The three remaining sides are lined with houses built over arcades, which is why Zamość is also called the town of arcades. The most ornate are the seventeenth-century Armenian houses, with parapet attics and carved doorways; one of them, the House under the Angel, has held the regional museum since 1941. The façade colours are not a modern invention but the result of successive restoration campaigns.
Armenians, Greeks and Jews
A planned trading town needs traders, so Zamoyski handed out charters. Armenians, Greeks and Jews were allowed to settle, run their own communities and build their own houses of worship. The Jewish community was founded in 1588, at first by Sephardi families arriving from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Turkey, with Ashkenazi families following in the next century. The late Renaissance synagogue from the early seventeenth century still stands and, since its restoration, houses a centre devoted to the history of the town's Jews. The writer Yitzhok Leybush Peretz and the poet Salomon Ettinger came from here, and Rosa Luxemburg was born in the town.
Church and school formed the second pillar. The collegiate church — today the cathedral of the Zamość-Lubaczów diocese — was built to Morando's design between 1587 and 1630, and its free-standing bell tower doubles as a viewpoint. In 1594 Zamoyski founded the Zamoyski Academy, one of the few universities of the old Commonwealth; Stanisław Staszic taught there, and the Austrian authorities closed it in 1784 after the first partition of Poland.
The fortress that Cossacks and Swedes could not take
The defences went up between 1579 and 1618. The circuit measured about 2,500 metres at the start of the seventeenth century, the ditches were more than ten metres wide and six to seven metres deep, and seven bastions stood at the corners of the heptagon, roughly two hundred metres apart — the effective range of the artillery of the day. The Venetian engineer Andrea dell'Acqua finished the work. It was tested almost at once: in 1648 the town held out against the Cossack and Tatar army of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and in 1656 against the Swedes, who lacked heavy guns.
Zamość went through five sieges in all and fell to assault only once, in 1809, when Polish troops took it from the Austrians. The fortress was thoroughly modernised between 1821 and 1831, which cost many old town buildings their original appearance, and during the November Uprising the town surrendered as the last Polish stronghold still holding out. An order of Tsar Alexander II dated 21 November 1866 abolished the fortress; because the demolition was done carelessly, a surprising amount survived.
What remains is Bastion VII with a stretch of wall, two gun cavaliers — in one of which the Russian administration ran the prison that held Walerian Łukasiński — and the Lublin, Lviv and Szczebrzeszyn gates. Half a kilometre south of the walls stands the Rotunda, a gun emplacement 54 metres across. Under the German occupation the Germans turned it into an execution site where more than eight thousand people were killed, many of them villagers expelled from the surrounding region. It is a memorial museum now, and worth a separate slot in the day.
Getting there
- By car — Zamość sits where national roads 17 and 74 cross, about 90 km south-east of Lublin and 250 km from Warsaw; traffic inside the old town is restricted, so it is easiest to park on its edge, by the Planty or the town park.
- By train — the station is on the Zawada–Hrubieszów line, about fifteen minutes on foot from the Great Market; services are sparse, so check the timetable before travelling.
- By bus — most long-distance coaches arrive from Lublin and Rzeszów, and the stops are within walking distance of the old town.
- By bike — a red-marked cycle route leaves the old town for Nielisz, where it joins the long-distance Green Velo trail.
Practical advice
The small scale works in your favour: the whole old town fits into a square a few hundred metres across and is best covered slowly on foot. Two places explain it better than any map — the cathedral bell tower and the ramparts by Bastion VII. Only from above does it become obvious that this is not a market town with walls around it, but a fortress with a town inside.
In summer the Great Market turns into a stage for the theatre festival that has run since 1976 and for folk music festivals; anyone after quiet should come early in the morning or in September. Zamość also makes a sensible base for the Roztocze hills — Roztocze National Park starts some fifteen kilometres to the south-west, and two small nature reserves lie right on the town boundary.
How to get there and practical info
- Location
- Zamość, Lublin Voivodeship; about 90 km south-east of Lublin
- Old town area
- roughly 75 hectares
- Great Market
- a square 100 m on a side, town hall in the northern row
- Town hall tower
- octagonal, about 52 m high
- UNESCO listing
- since 1992, as an example of a Renaissance town in Central Europe
- Time needed
- half a day for the old town, more with the museums and the Rotunda
- Current opening hours and tickets
- official website of the city of Zamość
When to go
May and June are the easiest months for a walk around the ramparts: the greenery is out and the heat is not. The arcades give shade once the midday sun starts to bite.
The Great Market fills with festivals and performances and the old town gets crowded. Early morning is empty, and the light then falls well on the eastern façades.
September and October are the quietest time here — museums without queues, and a view from the cathedral bell tower that carries far over the Roztocze hills.
Short days and a distinctly continental climate; January is colder here than on the Baltic coast. On the other hand, the snow-covered square looks much as it does on the old fortress plans.
Other sights in Roztocze
Straight-line distances from „Zamość Old Town" — calculated from real coordinates. By road it is often further.
Where to stay nearby
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