Kamienica Pod Kanarkiem, Kraków

Kamienica Pod Kanarkiem is the historic townhouse at Main Market Square 24, in Kraków’s Old Town. Its outward character is largely that of a nineteenth-century rental building, though only scattered earlier decoration remains visible. Behind that later appearance lies fabric dating from the late thirteenth century or the opening decades of the fourteenth.

A major enlargement in the later fourteenth century established the house’s basic arrangement. Notice the building’s entrance and imagine the layers beyond it. In the fifteenth century, a rear wing was added with an unusual two-part plan, and a raised passage joined its upper floors to those of the front house; one of that passage’s stone supports survives.

An early seventeenth-century remodelling in the late Renaissance manner added a second floor, and a grand three-flight staircase was built before 1787. This address has also served practical purposes: Austrian military pharmacists worked here from 1796 to 1809, followed by a Polish state pharmacy until 1813. After the fire of 1850, the front received a third storey and the courtyard gained open arched galleries.

During an 1877 renovation, historic ceilings were uncovered and restored. The building has been protected as a historic monument since the eighteenth of April 1968.