Stone, brick, earth, wood

Built or not built? i.e. ambitious plans and the realities of fortress development. Since its beginnings Zamość was to be an ideal town and fortress. All subsequent engineers and military architects tried to implement this idea. General Jan Mallet-Malletski, the author of a modernization plan of Zamość of 20 December 1825, presented a very ambitious and modern concept. 22 years later, in 1847, Colonel Berezowski made the most precise and evocative plan of Zamość Fortress ever. It repeated the older plan but included such details as planting every single tree and bush on the embankments and making fortress gardens. It was an ideal plan of an ideal fortress with a harmonious landscape, beautiful if unreal. The oddest thing of all is that the best illustrator of Zamość Fortress Jan Paweł Lelewel, whose some water-colours represent the real appearance of the fortress faithfully, gave free rein to his imagination elsewhere, illustrating something that was not there but was to have been. In this way, a coherent, evocative and never fulfilled vision of an ideal fortress was made for the last time in the history of Zamość. Due to lack of money, not one of the planned masonry redoubts with casemates was built; these redoubts were to have been the heart of huge lunettes* in front of curtain walls* joining Bastions* IV, V, VI and VII. We can admire the vision as presented by Lelewel but we should not trust it. Most probably Captain Engineer Jan Paweł Lelewel fell victim to his fascination with fortifications and Zamość.

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  None of the designed four great redoubts that were inside the lunettes of the northern and eastern front has been realized. Inside the lunette that was across from curtains VI and VII, as the only one in the fortress.

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