A cast of the Sleeping Lion in Valenciennes Square in Gliwice, a 2009 copy of a monument to Prussian soldiers unveiled in 1849.
The Sleeping Lion in Gliwice is today a copy of a former monument that commemorated Prussian soldiers who died in the Gliwice field hospital after the battles of 1813-1814. The original was unveiled on 15 October 1849 and dismantled after 1945.
The figure was cast at the Royal Prussian Iron Foundry in Gliwice to a design by Theodor Erdmann Kalide. King Frederick William IV of Prussia saw it in 1845, during a visit for the opening of the railway line to Katowice, and personally paid for the monument, the plinth and the fence. It was placed in a military cemetery where 65 soldiers lay buried. The monument was meant to commemorate the victims of the Napoleonic wars and to symbolise the peace that followed their end.
In 1890 the cemetery was closed to make way for development, and the monument and the exhumed remains were moved to the Promenade, later the City Park, today's Fryderyk Chopin Park. In 1945 the inscriptions were removed from the plinth, then the monument was dismantled and the lion figure was put into storage. The last mention of it dates from 1963. It is not known whether the original survives.
A stone plinth with the copy of the lion lying on it was placed in Valenciennes Square, next to the former “Haus Oberschlesien” hotel, today the seat of the city hall. The copy was cast in 2009 at the Gliwice Technical Equipment Works. The plinth has no inscriptions or information board. In Chopin Park the site of the former monument is marked only by a hollow in the lawn, and the soldiers' burial place is not marked.
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