Polish Sundial in Târgu Jiu, Romania - Sundials on Waymarking.com

The long description is the article written by Dan Uza published in the Compendium of the North American Sundial Society June 2015. As editor of this article, I have his agreement to publish the information here.

The List of Historical Monuments in Gorj County (South-Western Romania, Eastern Europe) records the existence of a sundial in the city of Târgu Jiu, dating back to 1940. It was built by one of the Polish war refugees who settled near the city for a short period of time after Nazi aggression on Poland in the autumn of 1939. The old refugee camp built by Polish soldiers was a small town in its own right housing 6,000 people, complete with roads, walkways, barracks, kitchens, canteens, sanitary points, classrooms, a chapel and cemetery. At first Romania tried to remain neutral, but was eventually forced to enter World War II under the command of the German Wehrmacht in June 1941 in order to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina provinces from the Russians. As a result, all remaining Polish refugees were handed over to the Germans and the camp near Târgu Jiu started to house political prisoners. Except for the sundial and some graves, nothing has been preserved to this day. The area can be reached by a road which emerges beyond the cemetery in Strada Narciselor (Daffodil Street), not far away from Brancusi's Endless Column. The dial’s precise position is marked by coordinates 45.043249° north latitude and 23.296707° east longitude. The sundial consists of a metal fence enclosure containing a horizontal circular dial poured in concrete with an adjacent pillar about 3 meters high on which a few reliefs can be seen (agricultural tools, a boat,two crossed swords, two hammers). A metal rod currently acts as a gnomon, connecting the center of the circle to a joint on the pillar. It was restored by the Municipality in 2014.

Different inscriptions can be read on the circular dial. First there are a series of embossed Arabic numerals, pale in color, placed towards the inside of the circle, ranging from 4 to 21, with 12 marking geographical north. Then there are other embossed Arabic numerals, dark in color, placed towards the outside of the circle, ranging from 4 to 21, slightly offset from the first row of numbers. Half hour, 10 minutes, as well as 2 minutes marks can also be seen. The text "czas wsch.-europ." is found on the outside and "czas sloneczny" on the inside, which in Polish stands for "Eastern European Time" and "Solar Time", respectively. This text is also repeated in Romanian on the eastern half of the dial: “timp est-european” and “timp solar”, respectively. There is also the text "OBÓZ POLSKI W TARGU JIU 1940 R", meaning "the Polish camp of Târgu Jiu 1940". Some sources presume that the letter R marks the month of September 1940 during which the sundial was supposedly built (from the Polish Równonoc Jesienna - autumnal equinox), however this theory is disputed by native Polish speaker Dariusz Oczki. Both Romanian and Polish sources state that the sundial was designed to show Romanian (GMT+2) as well as Polish time (GMT+1) so that the refugees knew what the hour was back home - a fact that can be easily disproved by direct observation. But even without a gnomon or in bad weather, the orientation and relative displacement of the 12 o’clock mark in the two horary series allows us to formulate a hypothesis about how the sundial operated.
Let us remember that noon is the moment of upper solar culmination, i.e. when the sun reaches its highest daily position in the sky. In common language, noon is often associated with 12 o’clock, but this is only valid if we stick to true solar time. If we refer to another time standard, for example the one given by a wristwatch which measures the legal time valid all over Romania, solar noon gets delayed geographically by a number of minutes proportional to the difference in longitude from the Eastern European time zone’s reference meridian (in this case 30 ° east) which passes over the Black Sea near the country’s coastline.
Take the case of the Târgu Jiu sundial, located at an eastern longitude of 23.30°. The longitude difference from the reference time meridian is here 30°-23.30° = 6.7°. As the sun appears to revolve through the sky from east to west 15° in an hour (360°/24 h), according to the watch noon is delayed for this location by nearly 27 minutes due to the difference in longitude. It can be seen that this value coincides with the displacement of the two time circles, i.e. the exterior one measuring Romanian standard time and the interior one measuring true solar time. Were the sundial to show Polish time instead of true solar, the relative displacement should have amounted to 60 minutes because Poland lies in the Central European Time zone, one full hour late than Romania’s Eastern European Time. This is evidently not the case here. Consequently, we reason that this sundial was intended to show Romanian Eastern European hours on the outer part of the circle and the true local Solar Time on the inner part of the circle. We have observed that the sundial correctly indicates both with an accuracy of a few minutes. Because there was no metal rod at the time of our visit in 2013, in order to test the sundial we resorted to stretching a piece of string connecting both gnomon anchor points. The photo in Fig. 3 was taken on July
the 4th at 11:35 a.m. (DST). As you can see, the shadow on the outside dial indicates roughly 10:39 Romanian time (10:12 solar on the inside). Accounting for the difference of one hour summer time
(which is artificially added on the last Sunday of every March) and the equation of time for the date (4 minutes, sundial being slower than the watch), we concluded that the accuracy of the sundial lies in the order of minutes. However, this provisional result had to be taken with a grain of salt. Only measurements taken after the metal rod gnomon was put back in place (2014) could offer a more accurate reading. The time stamp of the photo in Fig. 2 reveals that it was taken on June 30th at 1:31 p.m. By a remarkable coincidence, it shows a near perfect vertical gnomon shadow on the pillar so the time has to be solar noon. Furthermore, it can be shown that solar noon indeed occurred on that date in Târgu Jiu at 13:30 (DST). Unfortunately the grass clippings obscure the time circles so no detail shots of the dial are available to us. Be that as it may, we still find its accuracy impressive. It is the only sundial in a war refugee camp that we are aware of.

Sundial Type: Horizontal - Flat base, Ground or Pedestal mounted dial plate Related Web Site: Not listed

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