Toruń, Copernicus's birthplace, where citizens took their castle apart brick by brick
In 1454 the people of Toruń, fed up with the Teutonic Knights, stormed the Order's castle and dismantled its walls brick by brick, sparing only one tower, later used to hold gunpowder. Nineteen years later Nicolaus Copernicus was born in the town, which still keeps its medieval Old Town intact on the Vistula.
The name probably comes from the Old Slavic tor, a beaten path, making Toruń a roadside settlement; it first appears in writing in 1226 as Thorun, and the Germans later called it Thorn. People lived nearby as early as 1100 BC, and in the early Middle Ages a Slavonic settlement guarded a ford across the Vistula. Duke Konrad I of Masovia, having failed to subdue the pagan Prussians, invited the Teutonic Knights in, and on 28 December 1233 Hermann von Salza and Hermann Balk signed its town charter. Flooding forced a move to the present Old Town site in 1236, and a New Town for incoming craftsmen followed in 1264.
Membership of the Hanseatic League turned it into a major trading hub, and that wealth still shows in buildings ranging from Brick Gothic to Mannerist and Baroque. Relations with the Knights soured. Local gentry helped found the Prussian Confederation in 1440, which in 1454 asked Polish King Casimir IV Jagiellon to take the region back. The Thirteen Years' War that followed ended with the Second Peace of Thorn in 1466, when the Order gave up its claims and the town was recognised as Polish, with privileges like those of Gdańsk.
Toruń flourished as one of Poland's four largest cities. It installed the Tuba Dei, then the country's biggest church bell, in 1500, opened a royal mint in 1528 and adopted Protestantism in 1557. After the Second Partition of 1793 it passed to Prussia, was briefly regained under the Duchy of Warsaw and even served as the temporary Polish capital in April and May 1809, and returned to Poland after the First World War.
Bombing spared it in the Second World War, though German occupation brought harsh persecution of local Poles. Its medieval quarter became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. Today it is one of two capitals of the Kuyavian–Pomeranian Voivodeship, alongside Bydgoszcz, had 196,935 residents in December 2021, and is known for gingerbread baked there for close to a thousand years and for the Camerimage film festival celebrating cinematography.
Source: Toruń
