Raclawicka Panorama from Lwow to Wroclaw

Imagine painting a battle scene the size of 15 meter tall and 114 meter long.
Imagine this painting covering the inside of a round room so that it in fact has no beginning and no end.
Imagine that you stand in the middle of this room, as if you are on the top of a little hill, and that additional props between you and the painting itself make you feel you are there, watching the battle.

Imagine that this battle was painted during the years 1893 - 1894, and exhibited in Lwow from 1894. At that time Lwow (and Galicja) was part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire and there was no independent Poland.
Imagine that on April 4th 1794, at the Battle of Raclawicka, the Poles had won over the Russians.

Fast forward:
Lwow was part of independent Poland between the two world wars, but was occupied by the Soviet Union from the autumn of 1939 till the summer of 1941, and then again from the end of World War Two.
Today Lwow is the city of Lviv in Ukraine.

So the fact that this painting still exists and has been exhibited in Wroclaw since 1985, is as much of the story as the painting itself.

Seventy persons at a time enter the exhibition and for half an hour get the explanations of the battle as it unfolds in the painting.
The explanations are in Polish, but we received a small tape and listened to the English version.

It was definitely worth the visit.

PS. The two main artists behind the Raclawicka Panorama were Jan Styka (1858-1925) and Wojciech Kossak (1857 - 1942).