Poznan turns a disused amphitheatre into a bee garden

It will improve urban biodiversity, and enhance the attractiveness of the Citadel Park

Poznan announced on Monday that it will be transforming the site of the former amphitheatre in the Citadel Park into a honeybee garden. The Polish city will thus be announcing a tender later this year, to select a contractor to perform the works in the Citadel park.

The transformation is expected to have multiple benefits to the urban environment and the local population.

A place to enhance and explore biodiversity

The disused area of the former summer amphitheatre in the Cytadela Park of Poznan is set for a major environmental-friendly transformation. The quiet and sheltered, but sunny, place will soon become home to many bee-friendly plants and will regain a new function.

In the place of the former stage, flowerbeds will be installed together with plants and loungers. In order to gain a larger biologically active area, part of the stairs should be removed. There will also be individual seats, small viewing terraces, a water cascade, as well as subtle lighting that has been thought out in such a way as not to interfere with the activity of nocturnal insects (See the gallery above for visualisations).

On top of its biodiversity function, the place will also serve an educational function. Here, open air lessons will take place, so that children and teenagers from Poznań schools will be able to learn that bees are extremely useful creatures and should be protected. An additional attraction for puzzle lovers will be a mysterious inscription written in Morse code, hidden in the garden's architecture.

The municipality claims that the transformation of the former amphitheatre into a garden dedicated to bees is unique on a national scale and could make the garden one of the recognisable city attractions.

Poznań Citadel park

As indicated on the city’s travel website, the Citadel refers to the hill north of the city centre where Winiary fortress stood until 1945. The structure used to be part of the so-called new Prussian system, built between 1828 and 1839 on the grounds of two depopulated villages, Bonin and Winiary.

The citadel was largely destroyed in 1945 and in the following years it was turned into a large park, of nearly 100 ha. In the 1960s a Soviet cemetery was built here and actions to transform the Citadel into a monument of friendship between Poland and the USSR were undertaken.

Since 1992, the place is simply known as Cytadela Park and has become one of the favourite places for leisure of local people.