Józef Piłsudski Mound
Kraków Mounds
The highest of Kraków's five mounds and the largest mound in Poland. It stands at the top of Sowiniec in Wolski Forest. It is also known as the Independence Mound or the Freedom Mound.
History
The mound on the summit of Sowiniec in the Wolski Forest is the tallest of Kraków's five mounds and the largest mound in Poland. The idea of raising it came from Lieutenant Franciszek Supergan. In 1934 the Union of Polish Legionnaires backed the idea of a mound as a monument to the nation's struggle for independence, and a building committee headed by Colonel Walery Sławek was set up in Warsaw. The design was prepared by Franciszek Mączyński. Work began on 6 August 1934 - exactly twenty years after the First Cadre Company of the Legions set out from Kraków.
After the death of Marshal Józef Piłsudski the mound was named after him, and the work was completed on 9 July 1937. Soil from the First World War battlefields where Poles had fought was placed in the mound; some of it came from the summit of Krzemieniucha, among other places. The structure is about 35 m high, 111 m in diameter at the base and has a volume of 130,000 m³.
During the occupation, in 1941, Governor-General Hans Frank ordered the mound to be removed, but this never happened. After the war the authorities tried to erase it from the landscape and from the memory of Kraków's residents: in 1953 a tank removed the granite slab with the Legion Cross from the summit, and the whole slope was destroyed. The Committee for the Care of the Mound, set up in June 1980, initiated its restoration, which began a year later. At that time soil from the battlefields of the Second World War was laid at its foot, and people began to call it the "Grave of Graves". Downpours in 1996 and 1997 washed away 65% of the slopes, and the repairs took five years.
Around the mound stretches the Sowiniec Meadow - 4.2 ha, the largest meadow in the Wolski Forest, with benches, shelters and a playground. Since 2007 the Three Mounds Run has finished at the foot of the mound.
Did you know?
On 5 April 1938 soil from the island of Graciosa, where Major Ludwik Idzikowski, a pilot, was killed, was added to the mound. It was sent by the island's governor, and the urn was made from an aircraft engine cylinder.