Kamienica Pod Ewangelistami, Kraków

Kamienica Pod Ewangelistami is a historic townhouse on Kraków’s Main Market Square, distinguished by a columned portico with figures of the four Evangelists. Begun in the fourteenth century, it evolved from a burgher’s home into a patrician urban palace and has housed a bank branch since 1867.

Kamienica Pod Ewangelistami is the historic townhouse at Main Market Square 21, at the corner with Bracka Street in Kraków’s Old Town. Its façade acquired a columned portico before 1688, with figures of the four Evangelists set along its balustrade. The house itself began in the fourteenth century, and by the fifteenth it had the interior arrangement typical of a Kraków burgher’s home.

This address then grew far grander. From the later sixteenth century into the first half of the seventeenth, patrician families reshaped it into an urban palace. An early-Baroque arcaded gallery was created in the courtyard during that transformation.

In 1656 and 1657, General P. Wirtz, governor of occupied Kraków, was based here. After W.

Morsztyn bought the building in 1674, it was modernised, while rich interior decoration included stucco on the vault of a room incorrectly called the chapel, completed with mythological painted scenes. A fire in 1850 brought another reconstruction, including the addition of a third floor. Since 1867, a mortgage bank branch has operated here; today it is PKO. The building entered the heritage register on the twenty-fourth of November 1965.