Kamienica Czerwona, Kraków

Kamienica Czerwona is the historic townhouse at number forty-six on Kraków’s Main Market Square. Its story begins in the later fourteenth century, when it was a two-storey house with a raised forecourt. The name also recalls one of its early owners, the Brendler family, who held it during the first half of the sixteenth century.

Notice the entrance and the building’s street-facing front: behind it survives an unusually rich sequence of interiors. Gothic doorways, Renaissance ceilings, and Baroque plaster decoration remain here, alongside part of the old fittings. The Morsztyn family reshaped the front building around the turn of the eighteenth century, adding painted decoration to walls and ceilings; fragments are still preserved.

This house also has a decidedly sociable commercial past. A confectioner occupied it around the turn of the nineteenth century. In eighteen seventy-six, Antoni Hawełka opened the “Pod Palmą” shop here.

Beyond the shop stood a well-known eatery where men drank Bavarian, Pilsner, and other beers from thick glass mugs at marble-topped standing counters. Gas burners set into the walls even served to light cigars. The townhouse entered the heritage register on the thirteenth of December nineteen sixty-five.