Collegium Śniadeckiego, Kraków

Collegium Śniadeckiego is a historic Jagiellonian University building on Kopernika Street, with the Botanical Garden entrance beside it. Its name commemorates Jan Śniadecki, the mathematician and astronomer active at the university during Kołłątaj’s great reform. Before this became a university property, the site held a Renaissance compartmented garden in the sixteenth century and a palace built around sixteen hundred.

The Czartoryski princes later made it their suburban residence, then sold it to the Jesuits in seventeen fifty-two for conversion into a college. After the Jesuit order was dissolved, the palace and garden passed to the Kraków Academy. Between seventeen eighty-eight and seventeen ninety-two, Stanisław Zawadzki reshaped the palace; its neoclassical character follows an eighteenth-century return to the measured forms of ancient Greece and Rome.

Śniadecki also prompted the creation of an astronomical observatory here, while the botanical garden was founded in seventeen eighty-three and employed chemist and botanist Jan Dominik Jaśkiewicz. The observatory moved to Fort thirty-eight Skała in the nineteen sixties. Today the building contains the Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Botany, the Botanical Garden Museum, and rooms used by the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. It entered the heritage register on the twenty-ninth of September nineteen forty-seven.