Four days in Wrocław: the city that changed countries, and came out cheerful

The square is the size of a small park and has a second, smaller block of buildings standing in the middle of it, which is what makes it unusual: it is not an empty rectangle but a set of streets wrapped around an inner island of houses. Almost everything on it was rebuilt after 1945, some of it from the ground and some from a shell, and the fronts are a run of gables in every colour that photographs absurdly well.

The town hall at the eastern end is the exception. It went up over two centuries from the 1200s and came through the siege more or less intact, which in this city makes it a rarity. The inside is the point: a great hall on stone vaults, carved corbels of musicians and drunks, and a basement pub that has been serving since the Middle Ages.

Finish above the roofs. The tower of the big church at the northwest corner opens to visitors and gives you the whole plan of the city at once, the river, the islands, the concrete dome away to the east and the tower blocks past that.

Cross the river in the morning to the oldest part of the city, which is an island only in the technical sense now, one of the channels having been filled in. What is there is a short grid of brick streets, four or five churches in a few hundred metres, seminary walls, and almost no traffic.

The cathedral is the tall twin-towered one. It was burned out in 1945 and rebuilt over decades, and it holds the largest church organ in the country. There is a lift up the south tower, which is unusual and welcome, and the view takes in the whole loop of the river.

Then walk five minutes east into the university's botanical garden, laid out in the early nineteenth century in an old river channel behind the cathedral. It is small, beautifully kept, and the best place in Wrocław to spend an afternoon doing nothing. Come back to the island at dusk: a lamplighter in a cloak works his way along the streets with a pole, lighting the lamps one at a time, every evening of the year.

Book the panorama for the morning. It is a painting 15 metres high and 114 metres round, hung inside a purpose-built rotunda so that you stand in the middle of the battle of Racławice, with real earth and broken carts filling the space between you and the canvas so the join disappears. Two painters and a team finished it in 1894, in Lwów.

It came here with the people. After 1945 the canvas was in Wrocław but not on display, because the battle it shows is a Polish peasant army beating Russian troops, which was not a subject the government wanted illuminated. It went up only in 1985. Groups go in every half hour with audio guides, and the ticket also covers the national collection next door, so do them together.

Then take a tram east to the hall. Max Berg finished it in 1913 for the centenary of the campaign that pushed Napoleon out of Germany, and its concrete dome had a bigger span than anything built before it. It is a difficult, impressive, slightly forbidding building, and around it are a fountain that plays to music, an old Japanese garden and a park worth an hour.

The university's ceremonial hall is five minutes from the square and most people walk past the door. Inside is a baroque room of the 1730s in white, gold and trompe l'oeil, still used for graduations, along with a smaller music hall and a mathematical tower on the roof that was built as an observatory and now gives you a view along the river.

Then ten minutes west to the synagogue in its courtyard. It was built in 1829 and it survived the night in November 1938 when synagogues across Germany were burned, because this one is surrounded on all four sides by other buildings and the fire would have taken the street with it. It was used as a workshop and a store during the war and stood empty for decades after; it is a working synagogue again now, with a small exhibition on what happened to the community that built it.

That leaves the last hours for the thing this city is best at, which is walking about with no particular destination. Go back over the river, or south down the shopping street where two groups of bronze figures are sinking into and rising out of the pavement on either side.