Baszta Stolarska, Kraków

Baszta Stolarska is the Carpenters’ Tower: a surviving defensive tower built into Kraków’s old city walls. Its semicircular brick body rises from a square stone base, with three levels above it. Gothic here means the medieval building tradition of pointed forms and vertical emphasis; this tower is one of only three Kraków wall towers preserved intact.

Notice the decorative band beneath its roof. Above it, the roof narrows into an uneven, near-conical cap of red tiles. The tower was built in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to guard the Florian Gate and, later, the Barbican from the west.

Kraków’s carpenters’ and ropemakers’ guilds held responsibility for its defence, which explains its alternative name, the Tower of Carpenters and Ropemakers. It almost vanished in the early nineteenth century, when Kraków planned to demolish the city walls. Professor Feliks Radwański secured a Senate decision on the thirteenth of January eighteen seventeen to retain this stretch of medieval fortification, including this tower.

In eighteen seventy-four, the city gave the tower, the neighbouring Carpenters’ Tower, and the former Municipal Arsenal to Prince Władysław Czartoryski for the Czartoryski Princes Museum. The museum still owns Baszta Stolarska, and its interior serves as storage. A major restoration in twenty fifteen renewed the roof tiles, masonry, and interior.