Palaces and Parks of the Middle Oder

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Country
Poland
Year
2018
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Overview

Digitalisation project of the Palace Bojadła Foundation called Palaces and Parks of the Middle Oder. This complex of historical residences in today's Poland constitutes a diversified complex of residential architecture of great artistic value and tourist potential on a European scale and is not widely open to the public.The aim of the project is to create a factual base (historical documentation and iconography) for selected objects and to create a tourist route based on them.

The historic region of Middle Oder (currently Lubuskie and Lower Silesia) was the historical Polish-German-Czech borderland with high political significance, especially in the XVIII c when this land were subject to the personal union in the person of the Polish King and Saxon Elector. The aim of the Palace Bojadła Foundation is to create a factual base (historical documentation and iconography, full photographic documentation of the current state) for selected castle/palaces of the region (most of them are not publicly accessible) and to create a tourist route based on them, similar to historical complexes in Western Europe, i.e. the palace and park route in the Central Rhineland and in the Loire valley. This project has already embraced 12 historical residences and there are plans for the development of 49 objects of residential architecture of the Middle Oder in Lubuskie and the Lower Silesia Voivodships.The task has an interdisciplinary character. These studies, made by historians and art historians,  contain archival and iconographic materials collected and digitized from archives and private collections. Photographic documentation of current state of the buildings is prepared. All these material is available through the existing website "Palaces and Parks of the Middle Oder"; Visitors to the site www.palaceiparki.pl, after clicking on the selected thumbnail, are redirected to a specific study, which will be divided according to the unified scheme.

European Dimension

The project of the Palace Bojadła Foundation is devoted to increase knowledge about artistic and historic values of the architectural heritage of the historical Lower Silesia region. Currently the territory of the Lubuskie and Lower Silesia voivodships in Poland used to be border region of Poland, Germany and Czech kingdom. The variety of architectural heritage with international influences constitute an interesting complex of buildings which were created in different historical styles and were subject ot numerous influences (Italian, French, Austrian). The artistic heritage of this region stresses the European dimension of our common heritage. The variety of this heritage was very much scaled down during the times of communism and were subject to ideologically motivated destruction. After 1989 they were neglected and failed victim to the systemic change in Poland. What remains  as historic architectural fabric is a vivid proof of European character of the architectural heritage of Middle Oder. The efforts of the Palace Bojadła Foundation to improve public understanding of the value of the historical buildings of the region and their inhabitants (important personalities in the European history) strengthens identification with European values and heritage.