Zwierzyniec

Some people call the place Zwierzyniec and others refer to it as a small town between the Wieprz River and the Beetle. The former and the latter know that it is a charming little town established by Great Crown Chancellor and Hetman Jan Zamoyski at the end of the 16th century. He built a wooden manor house here, surrounded by a garden and then set up a “zwierzyniec”  and surrounded it by a 30-km fence. Bisons, elks, deer, roe deer, fallow deer and wild forest horses called tarpans used to live the this special “zoological garden”. The place was visited by kings, including Jan Kazimierz, Władysław IV, Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, who came here to hunt. In the 17th  century the manor house was changed into a palace and Marysieńka, who later was Polish king Jan II Sobieski’s wife, had a park and a pond made near the palace. There was a small island on the pond, with a theatre and visitors could spend their time taking gondola rides along a channel. Many of the buildings have been preserved till today; there is the building of Zamość Entail Board, a wooden villa – the Plenipotentiary’s House, a brewery from 1802 and a masonry tavern from the beginning of the 19th century. Another major tourist attraction and Zawierzyniec’s showpiece is a church on water of St. John of Nepomuk, richly decorated with polychromes made by Łukasz Smuglewicz. There are also two interesting monuments: one to Marysieńka’s favourite dog and the other one to locusts (to commemorate a plague of locusts in 1711).