Kamienica Dwór Polski, Wrocław

Kamienica Dwór Polski at number five on Market Square is a historic townhouse, known by the name of the restaurant housed within it. Its façade brings together Gothic and Renaissance work with late-Baroque additions, the result of repeated rebuilding across centuries. The first house on this plot rose in the thirteenth century as a modest, single-room home.

Between the years thirteen hundred and fourteen fifty, it grew wider and gained an added wing at the rear, where merchants kept a strongroom. That wing still contains a circular Gothic staircase, the only one of its kind preserved in Wrocław’s burgher architecture. A major remodelling in fifteen seventy-four reshaped the rooms and installed cross-rib vaulting that survives on the first floor.

The building was altered again in the Baroque manner in seventeen forty. Notice the gable above the façade: Corinthian pilasters, curved volutes and vases give it its elaborate silhouette. Food and drink have been part of this address for centuries.

A distinguished inn here welcomed King Władysław the Fourth Vasa in the early seventeenth century; later came a beerhouse, then a postwar fish bar. The restaurant opened as Dwór Wazów in nineteen ninety-one and received the name Dwór Polski three years later.