Travel Guide Puławy

At the end of the 18th century, this small town with a population of about 50,000 was the second largest political center in Poland after Warsaw, thanks to the Czartoryski family. Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski and, in particular, his wife Izabela Czartoryska turned Puławy into a kind of Polish Athens, founding, among other things, a large library and an impressive art collection. The main personalities of the intellectual elite of the time regularly stayed there. After the last partition of Poland in 1795 and the loss of the country's independence, Izabela Czartoryska built the Temple of the Sybil and the Gothic House to house works of art and objects celebrating the glory of the Polish nation. The Czartoryskis supported the 1830 uprising against the Russian occupiers, and the tsar confiscated their estate. The family went into exile in Paris, taking the collection with them. It returned to Poland in 1870, partly in Krakow, in the famous Czartoryski Museum. To this day, Puławy is an important scientific center, specializing in research on agriculture, fauna and flora. After the Second World War, a factory producing nitrates was established in Puławy, which transformed the town into an industrial center of some magnitude. Puławy is a pleasant stopover of a few hours, to be made from Kazimierz Dolny or Lublin, where there is, however, nothing to linger over.