Greetings all,
Kami is letting me onto the blog to play a bit. 🙂 I’ve been doing quite a bit of riding between our village, and various places in Poznan. Several routes take me past Inea Stadion and, due to a nasty corner with skinny walks, I’ve learned to divert behind a few row houses by the stadium. Across from the row, there is a patch of woods and back in the woods I noticed a long wall and various buildings. At first I assumed it was some kind of municipal complex, but, after a failed attempt to visit Fort VIIa near King’s Cross, I realized that it was most probably a ruin of another fort. Today, I decided to stop and take a look.
It turns out that I had stumbled onto the remains of Fort VIII, one of the perimeter fortifications built in Poznań in the late 1800s. Built next to Grunwaldska Street, one of the larger roads emanating out from Poznań, it was constructed between 1876 and 1882. Here it is, highlighted in red:
Here’s the Google Earth shot, with the fort next to the stadium. It is interesting to see it as a kind of blight on an otherwise thriving urban landscape. While I didn’t get this perspective until I got home and looked it up, I found it to have a sort of cursed, dead feeling too. The grounds were filled with trash and while things were greener than in the imagery here (this was probably a winter shot) it is every bit as grungy in person as it seems here. You can visit it on Google Earth by clicking here.
During World War II, the fort was first a POW camp for French, English, Soviet, Italian, and Polish soldiers. It was evacuated in January 1945 and used as a warehouse after thye war.
Since 1990, it has been in private hands (hence why I couldn’t get inside) but it has housed a disco, a motorcycle club, and a music venue (in what I hope is a nicer part of the fort than I got pictures of).
Here is a Polish page with some good detail on the fort. It translates well in Chrome. Enjoy the pictures!
Meandering Meltons 