Wschowa

Wschowa
Wschowa
	View from Protestant church to town hall
; Flag	; Coat of arms
	Wschowa
	Coordinates: 51°48′N 16°18′E / 51.8°N 16.3°E
Country	Poland
Voivodeship	Lubusz
County	Wschowa County
Gmina	Gmina Wschowa
	Government
• Mayor	Krzysztof Jerzy Grabka
	Area
• Total	8.38 km2 (3.24 sq mi)
	Population (2006)
• Total	14,573
• Density	1,700/km2 (4,500/sq mi)
Time zone	CET (UTC+1)
• Summer (DST)	CEST (UTC+2)
Postal code	67-400
Car plates	FWS
Website	http://www.wschowa.pl

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Wschowa [ˈfsxɔva] (German: Fraustadt) is a town in the Lubusz Voivodeship in Poland with 14,607 inhabitants (2004). It is the capital of Wschowa County.

[edit] History

Wschowa was originally a border fortress in a region disputed by the Polish dukes of Silesia and Greater Poland. After German colonists had established a settlement nearby, it received Magdeburg rights around 1250. The Old Polish name Veschow was first mentioned in 1248, while the Middle High German name Frowenstat Civitas first appeared in 1290. After the Silesian Piast dukes had gradually accepted Bohemian suzerainty, King Casimir III the Great in 1343 finally conquered it for Poland. The ziemia Wschowa then was incorporated into the Greater Polish Poznań Voivodeship of the Polish Crown.

Wschowa and its Latin school was one of the centres of the Protestant Reformation in Poland and a retreat for religious refugees in the days of the Counter-Reformation in adjacent Habsburg Silesia.

The Battle of Fraustadt occurred at Wschowa on February 3, 1706 during the Great Northern War, when Swedish forces defeated a joint army of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Saxony and Russia. Within the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, Wschowa was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia and incorporated into the province of South Prussia, until in 1807 it was awarded to the Duchy of Warsaw according to the Treaty of Tilsit.

A part of the Grand Duchy of Posen from 1815 on, the town was again incorporated into the Prussian Province of Posen in 1848. According to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Fraustadt remained under German rule and formed the southernmost district of the Posen-West Prussia border province. Since 1945 the area as a result of the 1945 Potsdam Conference again belongs to Poland.

Valerius Herberger (1562–1627), Lutheran theologian
Samuel Friedrich Lauterbach (1662–1728), Lutheran theologian and historian
Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664), Baroque poet, lived at Fraustadt on and off
Christian Gryphius (1649–1706), son, dramatist, was born here
Johannes Heinrich Valerius Graf (1837-1917), German painter
Bronisław Geremek (1932–2008), historian and politician, attended school at Wschowa
Waldy Dzikowski, politician, born 1959 at Wschowa