Market Square with Post Milestone Column and Market Fountain

The market square, which in its basic form and layout is a medieval market square, was redesigned in the year 2000.

In the middle of it a sow with her piglets frolics by the water – a reminiscence of the little river the "Wilde Sau" (Wild Sow) that crosses the town. Around the market the houses gleam with their restored façades. Most of the houses were (re)built after the great town fire of 1744, a few enlarged around the turn of the last century; even though they show Art Nouveau elements, they are now over 100 years old. The layout of the streets still reveals a key reason why Wilsdruff was able to develop better than the surrounding villages founded in the same period and became a town. The market square was laid out where two traffic routes, already important in the 12th century, crossed. From Meißen, seat of the bishop and margrave, the road led via Wilsdruff – Tharandt or Dippoldiswalde into Bohemia towards Prague, while the road from Dresden, then still via Pennrich, Kaufbach, Wilsdruff, provided the link to the Altzella monastery near Nossen and further into the interior of the country. Master Adam Friedrich Zürner, Royal-Polish and Electoral-Saxon land and border commissioner, who had been commissioned by Elector August the Strong to survey all the postal roads of the electorate, demanded in 1723 that Wilsdruff erect four columns with "distance inscriptions" to be placed before the town gates. After tough negotiations, it was agreed in 1730 to set up only one post milestone column as a market column. It bore distances to places in all four cardinal directions.