Wroclaw Main Railway Station

When Prussia opened Breslau Hauptbahnhof in 1857, the station reportedly required 6.7 million bricks and cost 449,000 thalers, an astronomical sum meant to project Prussian authority over recently conquered Silesia. Designed by Wilhelm Grapow in an English Tudor Gothic style, it was renamed Breslau Hauptbahnhof in 1904 and became Wrocław Główny after the war, changing hands, like the city itself, from German to Polish administration.

A 2010 to 2012 renovation turned up fragments of the station’s past rather than any hidden fortune. Workers uncovered early 20th century Art Nouveau ticket window frames, since rebuilt using the surviving pieces, along with two 1930s advertisements on the ground floor of the central bay. In the ceiling of the lower Session Hall, conservators found a wooden board left behind by postwar repair crews: dated 6 June 1946, it names three men who worked there that day, Ludwik Kubala and Jan Wis, both described as Poles from Kraków, and a third whose name survives only in garbled form, adding that all three were fired before the day was out.