ABSTRACT

The objective of this dissertation is to present an overview of Lipnica Murowana’s architecture and urban layout. Lipnica Murowana is a small town located in the Lesser Voivodeship, in the powiat. It was founded as a town in 1326 and operated as crown land for many centuries. Its preserved charter-period urban layout, as well as a range of valuable buildings (including the Church of St Leonard, which is inscribed onto the UNESCO World Heritage List) testify not only to its past significance but also pose a challenge to conservators in the present.

The first chapter of the dissertation outlines the object of research concerning Lipnica Murowana and presents the motivation behind the study.

The second chapter discusses the objectives of the study, namely the structuring of the state of the art concerning Lipnica Murowana and enhances it with the author’s findings. It also presents the research methods used and the scope of planned research. Additionally, it features a review of the current state of the art on the subject.

The third chapter presents a general overview of Lipnica Murowana’s historical background: the history of the issuance of its town charter, its development during the modern period and the slow decline of its significance up to its loss of town rights. Identifying the founding as an element of a broader settlement campaign by Władysław the Elbow-High is crucial in this section, as is the later functioning of the urban organism under German town law. Lipnica Murowana’s later history carried over into transformations of the city’s tissue — fires, wars and other disasters caused the deterioration of the town’s substance while also providing impulses for reconstruction and construction of new buildings. The author also performed a critical analysis of several historical accounts concerning Lipnica, including ruling out the hypothesis of Lipnica Murowana’s burghers establishing contact with the Hansa, and verifying the reportedly pre-Christian origins of the so-called Column of Światowid from the Church of St Leonard. The author also surveyed Lipnica Murowana’s market square with a ground-penetrating radar.

The fourth chapter includes an analysis of Lipnica Murowana’s development complex and a formulation of its development model based on urban diagrams. The author also attempted to recreate the pre-founding form of the town, using surviving spatial elements such as streets, plot divisions and the parish church as a basis. The analysis identified the most probable pre-founding layout to be that of a fork-type village. An overview of changes in the town’s space based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military maps, especially the so- called Mieg’s map, was also essential to this study.

The fifth chapter presents an overview of the town’s architecture. It lists religious (the churches of St Andrew, St Leonard and St Simon) and lay monuments (the starost’s manor, the Ledóchowski family manor, the common school and the remains of the town’s walls). It also lists buildings that have not survived but that were significant throughout Lipnica Murowana’s history. Further in the chapter, the author described the characteristics of local architecture and listed examples of buildings typical of the town. The chapter ends with a characteristic of the so-called Lipnica column—an architectural detail that is distinctive of this town.

The sixth chapter presents previous conservation measures to target the town, starting with the earliest (such as entries in the monuments register from the 1930s) and ending with most recent.

This section also presents a detailed analysis of architectural conservation forms present in Polish legislation, explored in the context of Lipnica Murowana. These forms include entering in the monuments register, listing in the Heritage Treasures List, acknowledgement as a monument to history, establishment of a cultural park, and conservation provisions stipulated in a local spatial development plan. All these forms can be applied in Lipnica Murowana.

The conclusions section includes a summary of the study’s findings.

The dissertation ends with a references list and a chronology of Lipnica Murowana’s history.