Venue
The venue for the conference European Community of Culture – EuCuComm 2025 will be the city of Lubań in Upper Lusatia.
Lubań is located in the Izerskie Plateau, on the River Kwisa and its tributary, the Siekierka. The town is located approximately 45 km north-west of Jelenia Góra and 25 km east of Zgorzelec. The conference will begin in the Old Town Hall in the Councillors’ Hall on 21. May 2025 at 4 p.m. Detailed programme >>>.
The history of the Lubań Town Hall:
From the time of its completion until today, the council chamber has been Luban’s most impressive secular building. The town hall was built between 1539 and 1544 to a design by an unknown author. A number of architectural solutions used in its construction suggest that it may have originated in Italy. The enormous scale of the investment, considering the financial possibilities of the city at the time, reflected the serious political ambitions of the 16th-century Ljubljana patriciate. Over the centuries, the building fell victim to fires several times. In 1554, the fire stripped it of its extraordinary splendour, which could never be restored. Restoration took two years. Just over 100 years later, in 1659, the elements once again ravaged the Town Hall. The flames failed to reach only the council chamber, the wine cellar and the town scales. Barely had the restoration of the building been completed and the ‘red hen’ made its presence known again in 1670. This time the town hall tower burned down. The renovation dragged on for four years. The fire of 1696 did not spare the Town Hall either. The fire destroyed its tower up to the level of the rim. The bells inside were lost. During the last great fire in Lubań in 1760, the highest parts of the building and the tower suffered. It took Lubanians nine years to rebuild the town hall. At the end of the first decade of the 19th century, a number of modernisation and renovation works were carried out inside the town hall. Above all, the internal space of the building was redesigned. The tower was repaired in 1820 and the roof of the town hall between 1826 and 1828. None of the fires that struck Luban in the early modern era damaged the town hall as badly as the shells of the German and Soviet armies fighting for the town in 1945. Its severely damaged structure threatened to collapse. Despite this, the new Polish administration of the city decided to rebuild the town hall. Due to a lack of funds, the renovation work begun in the early 1950s dragged on intermittently until 1972.
