Feniks, Wrocław

Feniks is Wrocław’s long-running department store on the eastern side of the Market Square. Opened in 1904 as the Barasch Brothers’ store, it was built for a German Jewish merchant family and later rebuilt after wartime damage. Its Art Nouveau origins survive behind a façade reshaped in 1929.

Feniks is the department store occupying this long market-square building, continuing a commercial life that began here in 1904. It first opened as the Barasch Brothers’ store, created for a German Jewish merchant family by the architect Georg Schneider between 1902 and 1904. At its debut, it ranked among Europe’s biggest and most technically advanced shops.

Notice the building’s decorative character: it belongs to Art Nouveau, a style that favours flowing, ornamental design over strict historical imitation. The original façade facing the Rynek did not remain untouched. In 1929 it was simplified in a modern fashion, and the vast glazed area over the principal entrance gave way to ordinary runs of windows.

A lightning strike had already damaged the enormous glass sphere that crowned the tower at the corner of Szewska and Kurzy Targ, so it was removed. The Barasch family sold its department-store chain and left the country around the turn of 1934 and 1935, under mounting Nazi pressure on Jewish owners. War badly damaged this building, yet rebuilding started soon after Polish administration began in 1945.

Trade returned on the seventh of August 1946, initially from the restored ground floor alone. After a full overhaul beginning in 1961, the store adopted the name Feniks in 1965—a fitting name for a building repeatedly brought back into use.