Abstract

The first appearance of the dragon in the Polish historical sources is rather precocious, since the motive of the fight against a dragon can be seen on a coin as soon as the second half of the 11th century, that is to say only a few decades after the realization of the oldest numismatic and textual sources of this country. During the following century, the oldest known Polish chronicle countains two fragments in which a protagonist is compared to a dragon and the number of cases of dragons’ representations on numismatic sources increases; finally, at the beginning of the 13th century, the first trace of the legend of the Wawel’s dragon appears in the Chronicle of the Poles written by Vincent Kadłubek.