Wrocław Market Square

Where it sits. Wrocław's Rynek is a rectangle of 213 by 178 metres in the middle of the old town on the left bank of the Oder, one of the largest medieval market squares in Europe and, unusually, one with a whole block of buildings standing in the middle of it. Eleven streets feed in — two at each corner, two narrow lanes and the open Kurzy Targ, the old chicken market — which is why the square never reads as empty even when it is quiet. It is joined at two diagonal corners by the smaller plac Solny, the salt market, and by the open ground in front of St Elizabeth's Church. The whole space is pedestrian, resurfaced between 1996 and 2000.

The story behind it. The market was laid out under Magdeburg law during the rule of Duke Henry I the Bearded, between about 1214 and 1232, on a low terrace six metres above the Oder and aligned with the Via Regia trade route. Patrician houses closed the frontages by the mid-fourteenth century; there are now sixty numbered plots, each with a traditional name usually drawn from the coat of arms on its facade — Under the Griffins, Under the Blue Sun. The central block holds two town halls. The Gothic Old Town Hall, built and rebuilt between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, has an astronomical clock of 1580 on its east gable and one of the most elaborate late-Gothic facades in central Europe; the New Town Hall next door is nineteenth-century. In 1945 the city, renamed Festung Breslau by the Germans, was besieged for nearly three months and much of it was flattened; the square was damaged but most of its buildings survived, and the restored frontages combine genuine fabric with careful reconstruction.

On screen. In the second half of November 2014, Steven Spielberg moved Bridge of Spies from Berlin to Wrocław, where the city's Wilhelmine streets doubled for East Berlin in the sequences showing the Berlin Wall going up in 1961. The choice was not arbitrary: Wrocław was German Breslau until 1945, so its pre-war architecture matches Berlin's in a way nothing in modern Berlin still does. The film shot its actual prisoner exchange on the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, where the 1962 swap really happened, and the rest of its European work at Babelsberg, Tempelhof and the Hohenschönhausen memorial. It was made under the working title St James Place and drew €3.7 million from the German Federal Film Fund. Wrocław has since become a regular substitute for wartime and Cold War Germany, and a walk around the Rynek's side streets shows why: whole blocks of period frontage, tram tracks, and almost no glass towers in the sightlines.

What you actually see today. The Old Town Hall's interior is the City Museum, and the Piwnica Świdnicka in its cellar — a beer house in more or less continuous use since the fourteenth century, currently between incarnations — is among the oldest restaurants in Europe. On the western side, two small houses linked by a Baroque arch are known as Jaś i Małgosia, Hansel and Gretel; behind them the tower of St Elizabeth's Church can be climbed, about 300 steps to a platform with the best overhead view of the square's layout. Since 2001 the city has been colonised by small bronze dwarfs, now numbering in the hundreds, placed at pavement level as a nod to the Orange Alternative, the absurdist protest movement that made the dwarf its symbol against the communist authorities in the 1980s; children hunt them with printed maps. The four frontages carry old names of their own — the Green Reed side, the Seven Electors side, the Golden Cup side and the Naked Swords side — and knowing them makes directions from locals suddenly intelligible.

Getting there and timing. Wrocław Główny, the main station, is a fifteen-minute walk or a short tram ride to the south; the airport is 10 kilometres west with a direct bus. The square and its approaches are flat, paved and step-free, though the historic cobbles are uneven in places. Cafés and restaurants ring the whole perimeter and the ones with the best position are priced accordingly; the streets towards plac Solny, where the flower stalls trade around the clock, are better value. Summer evenings are lively and loud, the student population being one of the largest in Poland. The Christmas market from late November fills the square and the salt market with wooden stalls and is one of the better ones in the country.