Arsenał Miejski, Kraków

Arsenał Miejski is the former city armoury on Pijarska Street, built to hold Kraków’s weapons and gunpowder. It began life in fifteen sixty-five and fifteen sixty-six, constructed by the municipal builder Gabriel Słoński. The original low sandstone building stood beside the defensive walls, between the carpenters’ and cabinetmakers’ towers, close to the Barbican.

Its main vaulted room held guns and cannon, while the far more volatile powder was kept below ground. The building escaped the nineteenth-century demolition of much of Kraków’s fortifications through Senator Feliks Radwański’s intervention. Between eighteen fifty-four and eighteen sixty-one, it gained an upper storey for storage and soldiers’ quarters, and was remodelled to resemble a compact early-Renaissance Italian castle.

Notice the connection with the Stolarska Tower: the exhibition route enters the ancient-art gallery through that tower. The gallery brings together Greek, Egyptian, Etruscan and Roman objects spanning from the third millennium before Christ to the fourth century after Christ, including Egyptian sarcophagi with a mummy, Etruscan tombs and sculpture. By the late nineteenth century, this former weapons store had become part of the Czartoryski museum complex.