Kamienica Arcybractwa Miłosierdzia, Kraków

The House of the Archconfraternity of Mercy, also called the Salomon House, is a protected historic townhouse at the corner of Sienna and Stolarska Streets in Kraków’s Old Town. Its long history runs from a medieval predecessor through confraternity ownership, and includes the Jewel Chamber, Portrait Room, and a corner figure of suffering Christ.

At Sienna Street five, on the corner with Stolarska Street, this is the House of the Archconfraternity of Mercy, also known as the Salomon House, a protected historic townhouse in Kraków’s Old Town. A Gothic house called the Grey House occupied this site around the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It first belonged to the Salomon family; in fifteen fifty-one, Mikołaj Salomon sold it to Hieronim Sapała.

When Sapała died without children in fifteen seventy-six, the property passed among his siblings and their children. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Archconfraternity of Mercy bought every share of the building for its own use. The house was extensively rebuilt in sixteen ninety-two.

Its ground floor still contains the Jewel Chamber, designed by Father Jan Dalamars. The confraternity was dissolved in seventeen ninety-six and the house was left empty, but the revived organization returned here in eighteen seventeen. Notice the figure of suffering Christ set into the corner of the façade. It dates from a nineteenth-century remodelling, which also created the Portrait Room for meetings of the confraternity’s governing board.