Kamienica Pod Gruszką, Kraków

Kamienica Pod Gruszką is the historic townhouse at Szczepańska 1, on the corner with Sławkowska 2 in Kraków’s Old Town. Its story reaches back to about the year 1300, when it was built on a square plot roughly fifteen metres on each side. The first owner recorded here was Ludwik, the town’s vogt, or civic magistrate.

By the end of the fourteenth century, the house gained a third floor, and an upstairs chamber received a Gothic net vault: stone ribs spread across the ceiling in an interlaced pattern, with painted decoration. Local legend adds a royal-romance chapter: Archduke Wilhelm Habsburg hid here to meet Queen Jadwiga in secret after their engagement ended and she married Władysław Jagiełło. The house was repeatedly remade by its owners.

In the late seventeenth century, Andrzej Żydowski commissioned Baltazar Fontana to decorate the upper rooms. Fontana’s hall is counted among Poland’s finest surviving town-house interiors, combining garlands and medallions, personifications of painting, sculpture, architecture and music, female busts, weapon-like ornaments, and Dutch tiles. In 1936 the building became the property of the Medical Chamber; during the German occupation it held an SS canteen and a café. Today it is associated with Kraków’s journalists’ club and a restaurant.