Zamość

Zamość was founded in 1580 by Jan Zamoyski, Chancellor and Hetman of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, on the trade route linking western and northern Europe with the Black Sea. Modelled on Italian trading cities, it was designed by the Paduan architect Bernardo Morando on an anthropomorphic plan: the Zamoyski Palace as the head, Grodzka Street as the backbone and the Salt and Water markets as the inner organs. Zamoyski invited settlers of many nations — Armenians, Greeks and Jews, the first of them Sephardi Jews from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Turkey — and in 1594 founded the Zamoyski Academy.

The fortress proved its worth: it held out against Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks in 1648 and the Swedes in 1656, and fell only during the Great Northern War. Annexed by Austria in 1772, it passed to the Duchy of Warsaw in 1809 and then to Russian-ruled Congress Poland; in the November Uprising of 1830–31 it was the last Polish stronghold to surrender. The demolition of the fortress in 1866 allowed the town to grow beyond its walls.

The Second World War was devastating. German bombing in September 1939 killed over 250 people, the Rotunda became a Gestapo execution site where more than 8,000 died, and the Nazis chose the fertile Zamość region for German colonisation, renaming the town Himmlerstadt and expelling tens of thousands of people, including thousands of children. The town's Jews, who made up 43 per cent of the population on the eve of the war, were deported to Bełżec and murdered. The Old Town itself survived, and in 1992 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List as a unique example of a Renaissance town in Central Europe.

Zamość is proud of its title "pearl of the Renaissance" and of being called "the new Padua". The Great Market Square, regarded as one of the most beautiful 16th-century squares in Europe, is the town's stage: the summer theatre season has put on performances there since 1976, and festivals of jazz, folk and religious film fill the year. The Karol Namysłowski Symphony Orchestra gives concerts in the town, and the Jazz na Kresach festival has run since 1982 to commemorate Mieczysław Kosz.

The town's past as a meeting place of nations is written on its buildings — the Armenian merchants' houses with their carved saints, lions and dragons, the former Orthodox church of St Nicholas with its Moldavian features, and the restored synagogue. The poet Solomon Ettinger and the writer Isaac Leib Peretz are among the prominent Jews who lived in the town.

Local folk culture of the Zamość region is kept alive by associations and fairs that also promote the regional kitchen. Memory of the war remains strong, centred on the Rotunda and on the children of the Zamość region taken by the Germans. Sport centres on the handball club Padwa Zamość and the football club Hetman Zamość.

Zamość had about 62,000 inhabitants in 2021, the second city of the Lublin province, though numbers have slipped since a peak of more than 68,000 in 1999 as families move to new houses in the surrounding villages. From 1975 to 1998 it was the capital of its own province, and it remains the centre of the Zamość region, with schools, colleges and offices serving a wide farming hinterland.

The economy rests on services and many small firms, alongside food factories that reflect the region's farming — grain milling, animal feed, frozen food and dairy — and makers of furniture, metal hardware and agricultural machinery. The town lies on the broad-gauge railway that runs from the former Soviet Union towards the Silesian mines, and less than 60 km from the crossings into Ukraine.

Most residents live in housing estates and suburbs outside the walls, above all in the south-eastern New Town, while the Old Town is the place for strolls, cafés and churchgoing. A municipal bus network, recently joined by electric buses, links the estates with the surrounding villages.

The cooking of the Zamość region is rural and filling, and buckwheat groats run through many dishes of the Lublin region. The best-known local dish is the Biłgoraj pieróg, from the Biłgoraj Land to the south-west: a pie, baked with or without a yeast-dough crust, filled with cooked potatoes, curd cheese and buckwheat groats, with eggs, sour cream, fatback or lard and mint, and served hot or cold with sour cream, milk or butter. A bread roll filled with the same mixture is called kaszak.

Lublin's cebularz, a wheat-dough pancake topped with onion and poppy seeds, is sold across the region, and pierogi are widely served. Restaurants and cafés under the arcades of the Great Market Square serve Polish dishes at tables set out on the square in summer, and regional food is promoted at local fairs. The region's fertile black soil supports farming, and the town has a large grain company, a dairy and a frozen-food plant.