Baszta Ciesielska, Kraków

Baszta Ciesielska is one of the three fully preserved towers of Kraków’s medieval walls. Built as a square tower in the fourteenth century and raised with a six-sided upper floor in the fifteenth, it was saved from demolition in eighteen seventeen. It is now owned by the Princes Czartoryski Museum.

Baszta Ciesielska is one of only three Kraków wall towers to survive intact. Its lower body begins as a square tower built in the fourteenth century, but the final storey changes into a six-sided form added in the fifteenth. That alteration gives the tower its particularly odd silhouette: a stern medieval block below, then a narrower polygon above.

Notice the shallow recesses in that upper section. There are seven of them, square at their bases and rounded at the top; they are decorative rather than openings for attack. The roof, close to a six-sided pyramid and covered in red tiles, completes the shape.

The tower is Gothic, meaning it belongs to the medieval architectural language of this period. For over a hundred years after its construction, this was the only tower along the wall between the Florian and Sławkowska gates. In the early nineteenth century, it faced demolition with much of Kraków’s fortifications.

Professor Feliks Radwański campaigned to save this stretch, arguing that the walls also protected St Mary’s Church from foul winds blowing from Kleparz. On the thirteenth of January eighteen seventeen, the Kraków Senate preserved this section of the medieval defences. The tower now belongs to the Princes Czartoryski Museum and serves as museum storage.