Roaming along the beautiful old streets of Lublin, you can find a small square where a parish church, destroyed in the 19th century, stood many centuries ago.

Despite the curious local legends saying that the first chapel had appeared on this site even before the city was founded, historians are inclined to think that the church was built here at the turn of the 13th-14th centuries. A document in the city archive confirms this: it says that the Church of St. Michael the Archangel was erected in Lublin in 1282 after a great fire.

In 1341, the temple was greatly expanded. A parish school for poor children, a hospital, and a priest’s house were built nearby. So the square became the center of the city.

The church was seriously damaged in 1575 when another fire broke out in the city. But the temple was quickly restored. Since the artisans were in a hurry to rebuild the main temple of Lublin and used not the most damage-proof materials as there was not enough money, a few years later, the bell tower of the church collapsed, terrifying the locals. Many thought that this was a bad sign and even opposed the restoration works in the temple. But despite the protests, the building was renovated.

Numerous reconstructions and ill-considered restorations made it so that at the beginning of the 19th century, the church building was covered with cracks. If a strong wind was blowing, it seemed that the church would fall apart. And to prevent any accident, the head of the city ordered to demolish the church. Only stones from the building foundation remained. The citizens founded a square on its place as a memory of the first temple and a beautiful legend about Prince Leszek the Black. There is a model of the old temple in the center of the ruins, and the place itself is called the Former Parish Square (Po Farze).