The District Of Mutual Respect

To Wrocław’s other accolades (the most bridges and islands, the most Nobel Prize winners, the most gnomes) you canattach one more curious addition: within a mere 400 metres of the city’s historic Old Town one can find the houses of worship of four different religious denominations – a spatial and spiritual arrangement unique in Poland, and as far as we’re aware, all of Europe. Dubbed the ‘District of Mutual Respect’, the anomalous area includes three churches - Lutheran, Orthodox and Roman Catholic - and a Jewish synagogue almost side-by-side in a short crescent curling along the promenade where the city’s (now demolished) defensive fortifications once stood. For a city (for better or worse) forever at the crossroads of Europe, whose name and national status have changed throughout history more than any other city on the continent, and whose diverse religious, cultural and architectural makeup has been informed over the centuries by Germans, Poles, Bohemians, Austrians and Jews alike, the District of Mutual Respect is perhaps the detail most defining of the Wrocław ‘microcosm.’