The Mice Tower in Kruszwica

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Mysia Wieża w Kruszwicy (The Mice Tower in Kruszwica) – a brick, octagonal tower, 32 metres high, located in Kruszwica, on the Rzępowski peninsula of Lake Gopło. A peculiarity of its architecture is that it is round in the middle, and that the holes that are on its wall are not window openings, but traces of scaffolding. The tower is a remnant of the castle in Kruszwica, built by King Casimir the Great around 1350. It was originally a fortress to guard Kruszwica against the Teutonic Knights. Then, after the fall of that order, it became the seat of the Kruszwica castellany and starosty. It was destroyed (blown up) by the Swedes in 1657; earlier it had been occupied by them for two years. The tower survived and since 1895 has been a tourist attraction of Kruszwica and a viewpoint.

From its top you can see Inowrocław, Strzelno, Radziejów. There are several legends connected with the Mice Tower. The name refers to the legend of Popiel, the legendary ruler of Poland, exiled by the Polanian prince, Siemowit (an ancestor of Mieszko I). This legend is quoted in the Polish Chronicle by Gall Anonim. However, the story is said to have happened almost four hundred years before the present tower was built, and it is not located here until the Greater Poland Chronicle. A popular theory is that the legend was probably taken from Western European sources, as a similar legend about an evil ruler being devoured by mice in a tower exists in Germany and concerns the Mysa Tower in the town of Bingen am Rhein. However, as Jacek Banaszkiewicz has shown, the legend given by Gallus Anonymus about the ruler being devoured by mice could not have been borrowed from Germany, as it appears earlier, at the stage of the emergence of the ‘mouse legends’, and is simply part of the Proto-Indo-European symbolic legacy.