 Hello everyone. Now we will move, we were on markets, we were in harbour, we will move to the more real part of the medieval town. So, I will tell you about my current project, which is quite similar to what we tried to achieve here in the session, in some way of course. But first let me start with some kind of a subject of my research, because I suppose not all of you are familiar with Central Europe. We have there a specific kind of a medieval town, there is no good English territory. So, it's a town that was formed in one, both in a, founded in a legal and in a spatial sense in one time, as an agreement between the Lord and the Anthem of Nara who is creating the new community. And what is important, this town is strongly under the control of this Lord. But what is important for me from my perspective is that it has a borderline, often regular layout with a central market and it's organized into a plot. So, this town empty spaces, it might be confusing. I came to it during some digging in medieval town inside the city walls when I found literally nothing from the ages. There should be something. So, I start to wonder, we have the center, we have the borderline, the city wall, and there is this between. So, I start to thinking, to posing some hypothesis that I assumed at the beginning that it's different on the city center. That it might be the area where all the crafts, like blacksmiths or leather producers were moved. And maybe that was the area of exclusion, all the excluded people were living there. So, to check this hypothesis, I think I need to ask two major questions. How they looked at this marginal part and what was their function. So, I believe that in every, this kind of research, like in historical archaeology, we need to mix all the approaches that we can find. So, I'm currently working with historians in the Institute of Archaeology. So, we have these written records, which can give us a lot of information about topography. But there's often a problem with exact placing, the description to the exact spot in the town. On contrary in archaeology, of course, we exactly know where we are, but we never know when we are. There is always a problem with archaeology. You can look on the iconography, which is in my opinion also a good source, but it's also a piece of art, especially with the early sources, like 16th century views of that. So, it might be considered as some kind of artistic view of the reality. So, we never know if it's true that there was a lot of empty green spaces around the city center. And we have this last approach, typical for historical classes project. The urban morphology, which starts mostly with catastrophes and assumes that nothing can change. But we never know on what town we are exactly looking. But when we compare these data, we can try to have some broader view. So, I will try to show you the problem I'm working on two examples of medieval Wroclaw and new town of Prague in Bohemia. So, the first situation, when we think about something like empty spaces that might be literally empty, that is peripheral area, is the moment when the new town is created, is founded. So, in Wroclaw, that was one of the major early medieval centers in Silesia. But there was this huge change, this breakthrough, in 13th century, when the Lord the Duke founded the new town. So, west from the previous early medieval settlement, the new market was created, the large rectangular market with surrounding blocks. And I suppose it wasn't in fact proven, it's a problem in Prague, but I suppose that there was some kind of borderline. The city wall was built in the 13th century, few decades after the establishment of the town. And the archeological and architectural analysis conducted by researchers in Wroclaw proved that the town wasn't founded in his final version as a big regular form, but it was built part by part, it first was blocked around the market square. So, we can assume that the area around was empty, there are any indication of occupation before the founding of the town. So, what happens next, when all the area inside the city walls is full of houses, the town was expanded, it happened in 1261. According to some archeological excavations, the oldest material found in several places was much later. So, we can assume that this place wasn't in fact exactly filled with new blocks. It was a process that was long-lasting, it was kind of an empty area. Possibly really empty. So, it's a kind of a model that town is slowly growing. Another situation is when all the town is founded as a really big, huge area inside the city walls. And this situation happens in New Town of Prague. This city, in fact, was founded in 1347 by the Emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg as his capital after he became an emperor. And it was like 360 hectares of the space. It is believed that much of this area was in fact empty and never covered with urban houses, which were concentrated around the main markets and main streets. So, the question is why it was so big and so empty. So, I assume that there might be three possibilities. The first is the defensive part. As you can see on this train model, the southern part is quite full of steep slopes and narrow valleys. There is a stream there between the Vyshekhar Castle and the other hills. But it was logical to connect the new wall that was built during the first two years of existence of town with an older defensive structure, Vyshekhar Castle, and to build the defensive point on the Caddo Field, the highest point in this area. Another, it might be a demand for a land. When Emperor was founding this town, he was forming also a few churches. So, he needed to granted some lands inside the city walls. But when he reclaimed the land from previous owners, it wasn't possible to take it all. Some of it was still full of houses, some previous servers. So, possibly it was better to have a bigger town and put all these churches there. And the last is that this is a kind of a statement of the Emperor. He created a few church institutions that were representing parts of his propaganda program, a program of his reign. And there, as claimed in the art history, they are creating a cross that was quite visible from Vyshekhar Castle. So, this situation, this is an exception in central of it. This is one of the biggest towns. I think this kind of a town we can easily find in the western Europe or in Italy. So, the next situation when we can spot some kind of emptiness in the town is when the land was abandoned, which is easily, quite easily spotted in the west when there was a black death. But this situation never happened in central Europe. So, we don't have the shrinking towns. But according to the written records, there is a term in town records, ala de zeta, which can be translated from one thing to the deserted urban plot. I gathered these places and put them on the map. It was done in 19th century, but by Czech historian Vasa Tomek, all these records disappeared later, they were just burned. So, it's the last thing we have. But according to his analysis, he connected the records with the plots. So, they are all over the town. It's like 100 years of existence of the town, so they were changing. It was a short period. So, it seems that they are mostly showing the dynamic of changes of urban environment. So, we know that there are some emptiness on peripheries. So, were they really empty? According to some archeological excavation, rescue excavation, in track, in this peripheral area, there are several places with something described as a garden layer. So, the thick layer of organic soil with a material from 1415 to 1617 or even 18th century. The area that was never used to build a house there. There was just a kind of orchard or gardens. And in the written records from track, we have also a lot of information about the vineyards, so vineyards and gardens, so altos. And we can see that the whole southern part of the town was full of vineyards during the Middle Ages. We have similar situation in growth in this extension area, which in fact had some kind was even described in 16th century as having some kind of a suburban character. On this view of the town from 16th century, which is quite accurate, it was proven during several architectural analysis, we can see a lot of green, like kind of a green bell and quite large, large plots. So, possibly this rear area of towns are used as a green area. So, what with industry? Thank you to analysis done by Mateusz Golinski in Groslaw about sociotopography. He discovered based on the tax registers that all malt producers were in this extended area. So, it was probably safer to use big pharmacies. There is a risk of fire. So, it's better when they are working there and they have a lot of space. And even the plots there are called the malt plots, like the Asiatolium. So, the same situation is with weavers and similar textile crafts. We know that they need a lot of space to produce their fabrics. And this area with lots of dense buildings, it can provide it for them. Also, we can see certain pattern here. Europeans down the controlled by Lord, part of the land inside the city walls was preserved for a lot. It was preserved, his land preserved. In Groslaw, for example, we have a Lord Castle there. He could ground this land to some church institution, to some nobles or to some Jews who could live under his protection. And it's not exception in such a situation that the Jews are living far from the city center, but they are not living there because they are excluded. It seems they might be living there because this land is not under jurisdiction of the town. Another thing we need to remember is that the land in this peripheral area is much cheaper. So, the tax is the only reason why it is probably cheaper. And the tax is much, much lower than in the city center. So possibly people with less income could afford to buy a house to start a life in the city. But also the wealthy people were buying those houses and renting them for a lower class. But what I just learned from one of my friends who is working on books on the registers from medieval Krakow, it's that the poor are living everywhere, especially in the city center. They are living on the market square. So they are not excluded or pushed to some far end of the town, sometimes maybe to the outside of the town, which is, I suppose, more possible. So, it's quite quick. So, let's go to the conclusion. I believe, especially in central European towns, that the peripheries are not so empty. It's hard to prove exactly that there is actual emptiness, especially in archeological context. There are kind of a transition zone, that place where people could build something new, could run a business, invest in land. Or they were just prepared for a future. The town was much bigger, just to be, when it was growing, it could afford it. So are these places a non-place, which we should discuss here? From one perspective, if it's just out of a jurisdiction of the municipality, we cannot say it's non-places. But sometimes there are quite, quite, ugly places to live, because all the puggers were just moving there to avoid the prosecution. But I suppose some of them might be, like the small streets around the corners of the city wall. Maybe as a place, some kind of, I think we should look on it in kind of a literature, in how people were perceived, the space of the town in the Middle Ages. Thank you.