GŁOWÓW. THE ENIGMA OF THE PLAN FOR THE FIRST RENAISSANCE TOWN IN POLAND
JERZY KOWALCZYK
Głowów, a small town near Rzeszów, later renamed Głogów, was founded in 1570 by Krzysztof Głowa, secretary to king Zygmunt August. Scholars consider Głowów to be the first town in Poland with a Renaissance layout. The three basic documents referring to the founding of the town, now kept in the State Archive in Rzeszów, were uncovered and published in part, in 1933, by the regionalist Kazimierz Nitka. However, the fundamental publication is an article with commentaries by Franciszek Kotula from 1954. Kotula began the discussion on the original plan of the town. The starting point was Krzysztof Głowa’s foundation privilege issued in 1570 and the second version of the location act issued after the founder’s death by his widow Chrystyna of Paniowo. Initially the founder planned a town of 200 houses with a rectangular town square, with a town hall and eighot streets: four running crosswise and four “transverse or slantwise”. The exact location of the latter streets is unclear. Głowa set aside four places for a church, a manor, a hospital and a bath house. As the town did not come up to the expectations of the founder, having few settlers, the widow Chrystyna of Paniowo issued a second, modified foundation act. She reduced the number of houses to 120 and resigned from building the four “transverse or slantwise” streets. Her husband’s plans to set apart sites for building public facilities remained intact. The publication of Franciszek Kotula’s article generated lively interest and the Głowów plan was debated by a number of historians of urban planning: Stanisław Herbst, Wojciech Kalinowski, Teresa Zarębska, Wojciech Trzebiński, Mieczysław Książek. However, they were unable to situate the “transverse or slantwise” streets on the plan of the ideal city, though they showed the relationship between the plan and Italian urban planning theory.
The author proposes a simple solution, to situate the “transverse or slantwise” streets between the arms of the cross-shaped layout, giving the plan a radial arrangement. The radial layout for a cities has its origin in the Italian theory of urban planning (Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Baldassare Peruzzzi, Antonio da Sangallo). Though there were no cities with a radial layout in Italy during the Renaissance period (Palma Nuova was only built in 1593), two such towns were founded in the middle of the 16th c. in the Spanish Netherlands: Mariembourg (1546) and Philippeville (1555). In Poland, Frampol, founded by Marek Antoni Buttler c. 1736, is an example of a radial town built according to Renaissance principles.
Keywords: Głowów (Głogów), Renaissance urban planning, radial city layout