Kamienica Betmanowska, Kraków

Kamienica Betmanowska is the historic townhouse at number forty-four on the Main Market Square. What appears as one frontage began as two separate houses, Bełzowska and Betmanowska. Wincenty Kirchmayer had them joined in 1841, creating the building before you.

Above the entrance, the old emblem is a Gothic head of Saint John. It belonged to the Betmanowska half, the portion on the right when the façade is viewed from the square, and gave that house its earlier name, “Under the Severed Head.” The other house was home to Seweryn Bethman, the salt-mine administrator from Wieliczka.

Kirchmayer made the attic level advertise the nineteenth-century world he lived in. Its reliefs bring together Athena, Ceres and Hermes as personifications of commerce and industry, while a sailing ship and a train appear behind them: trade by sea meets the railway age. In 1849, Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich lodged here while travelling with troops toward Hungary. The building entered the heritage register on the ninth of December 1965.