Dawny Hotel "Cracovia", Kraków

The former Hotel “Cracovia” is a landmark modernist hotel building designed by Witold Cęckiewicz and completed for Orbis in 1965. Once Poland’s longest hotel, it used pioneering large-panel construction. After closing in 2011, it was acquired by the National Museum in Kraków and protected alongside the Kijów cinema.

The long horizontal block before you is the former Hotel “Cracovia,” a protected historic hotel building in Kraków. Designed by Witold Cęckiewicz, it was built from 1960 to 1965 for the Polish travel bureau Orbis. When it opened on the twenty-second of June 1965, its 150-metre length made it Poland’s longest hotel, as well as one of its largest and most modern.

The ground here was wet, near a filled-in former channel of the Rudawa; after the foundations began to sink, the hotel was placed on a reinforced-concrete slab. Notice the repeated bands of the guest-room storeys across the façade. Their rapid assembly came from Poland’s first use of large-panel construction in a hotel.

The building once contained 309 rooms, nine suites, a restaurant seating about 500 people, and even a casino. Films including “Jowita” and “A Census of Adulteresses” were made here. The hotel closed in 2011, and the National Museum in Kraków acquired it in 2016. That same year, Cracovia and the neighbouring Kijów cinema entered the heritage register together.