Dom Katedralny, Kraków

Dom Katedralny is the red-brick, five-storey building here on Wawel Hill, pressed against the northern line of the fortifications. Also known as the House of the Rorantists and Mansionaries, it occupies the stretch between the former seminary and the Vasa Gate. What appears to be one house is really a union of two older buildings.

The eastern part began as a royal townhouse founded by King Casimir the Great; by 1381, it had become a granary. In the first half of the sixteenth century, part of the house was adapted for the Rorantists’ lodgings. The western building dates from the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

It was refurbished in 1724 for the cathedral mansionaries’ college, a community established in 1381 and 1382 by Bishop Zawisza Kurozwęcki, whose clergy conducted services in St Mary’s Chapel. The two sections were joined and restored in 1904 and 1905. Notice the enclosed terrace before the building: its wall incorporates architectural fragments from the cathedral dating to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Two floors now hold the John Paul II Cathedral Museum, while the remaining rooms are homes for cathedral clergy and staff.