Kamienica Czyncielów, Kraków

Kamienica Czyncielów is an Art Nouveau townhouse at the corner of Rynek Główny and Plac Mariacki. Built in 1907–1908, it replaced an older house where Stanisław Wyspiański wrote The Wedding. Its folk-inspired façade includes a caduceus celebrating trade and recalls the building’s early department-store history.

At the meeting of Rynek Główny and Plac Mariacki, Kamienica Czyncielów is the early twentieth-century townhouse before you. The building now standing here went up between 1907 and 1908 for Celestyn Czynciel, with Rajmund Meus responsible for its structure and Ludwik Wojtyczko for its façades. Its predecessor had begun after 1313, then expanded into a full Kraków townhouse during the fifteenth century.

The remarkable literary chapter came just before its end: Stanisław Wyspiański rented a room here from 1898 to 1901, and around the turn of 1900 and 1901 he wrote his drama The Wedding in that room. The memorial plaque on the façade marks this connection. The old house was demolished in 1906.

Notice the folk-inspired ornament across this replacement façade, created in Art Nouveau, a style that favours richly decorative modern design. Among those motifs is a caduceus, the emblem of Mercury, god of trade. That suits a building which housed one of Kraków’s first modern department stores.

Its ground floor held the Bilewski warehouse until 1939, while Leon Grabowski’s women’s fashion salon occupied the first floor. The building has been protected as a historic monument since the seventeenth of October 1984.