Portrait of the city. The Architecture of Kalisz in Historical Documents
ed. Grażyna Schlender, Jerzy Aleksander Splitt, Kalisz 2010.

The Architecture of Kalisz in Historical Documents is the latest album to be published by the State Archive in Kalisz. Created in collaboration with the Regional Museum of the Kalisz Lands, its publication accompanied an exhibition of the same title. The authors of the texts were Anna Bestian-Zajac, Edyta Pietrzak, Grażyna Schlender, Karolina Sobańska and Jerzy A. Splitt. Grażyna Schlender, Ph.D. and Jerzy A. Splitt were responsible for the editing and the selection of the illustrations. The album is a bilingual publication and the English translations are the work of Caryl Swift and Robert E. Kotschmarow. Its 315 pages contain 226 illustrations; there are lithographs, steel engravings, bas-reliefs, photographs, design projects and blueprints and technical drawings, all of them depicting the city’s development over the ages and, in many cases, giving us a glimpse of buildings and structures now lost to us forever. As such, this is something of a ‘family’ album, wherein what we see is a Kalisz captured in photos from bygone days. It contains lithographs from Edward Stawiecki’s An Album of Kalisz, published in 1858, images from the first ever photographic album of Kalisz, created by Jan Wilhelm Diehl in the 1870s and the work of well-known Kalisz photographers Stanisław Zewald and Wincenty Boretti, to name but a few. As you browse through the album, you will once again be able to relish the sight the Swiss Cottage and the orangery which once graced the park, the Warsaw Toll-Gate in all its former splendour and Babina Street when the Babinka Canal still flowed nearby. Two of the chapters have introductions, one by Grażyna Schlender, Ph.D., Director of the State Archive in Kalisz and the other by Jerzy Aleksander Splitt, Director of the Regional Museum of the Kalisz Lands. There are seven chapters in all, namely, City Panoramas, Maps and Charts of Kalisz, The Town Hall and the Main Market Square, Sacred Sites, The Park, Squares, Bridges and Streets and, finally, Selected Sites of Architectural Interest. A brief history of the buildings and sites depicted, be they public or sacred, squares and streets, or bridges and toll-gates, is included. The authors’ intention throughout was to strive for the skilful juxtaposition of words and illustrations. The State Archive in Kalisz thus warmly invites you to buy its latest publication, this illustrated history of the city, and to enjoy its presentation of the Kalisz of yore.