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Author of this contribution aims to offer a historical panorama of the so called „18th- Centuries of Kalisz”, a jubilee of this Polish town – claimed officialy to be the oldest in this country during series of events, organised in 1960. A deep background and goals of this politically-fueled anniversary can be traced in and reconstructed from archives, press reports and postwar city guides. A precisely prepared event, the jubilee is analysed in terms of critical gesture of local political elites and official discourse of historiography, aiming at critical discontinuation from the interwar legacy of Kalisz, a town restored and reconstructed after the Great War. Author presents various aspects of the 1960-anniversary of Kalisz as manipulations in social memory, discussing also investment campaign initiated by the socialist authorities in the 1960s and related to the jubilee. As a result of alliance between the local and state-dictated political discourses of the anniversary, Kalisz has still been “the oldest town in Poland”, despite the irrelevance of this claim to historical facts, obscuring the real urban legacy of the town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the discussion on the appearance of Kalisz, which was to be rebuilt after the destruction in 1914, the opinion of the German conservator of monuments, Julius Kohte, was of great importance, as he prepared a detailed expert opinion on the preserved valuable buildings and the possibility of their incorporation into the landscape of the rebuilt city and use as an architectural template. Apart from the aforementioned opinion, the analysis covered articles about the monuments of Kalisz written by Kohte during World War I and published in German magazines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]