Kamienica pod Półksiężycem, Wrocław

Kamienica pod Półksiężycem is the historic townhouse before you on the north frontage of Wrocław’s Market Square, the stretch known as the Sweet Market. Its site was first built on in the first half of the fourteenth century. By the century’s end, the house had been enlarged with a second range, and its cellars received brick vaulting: a cross vault at the front, and ribbed vaulting farther back.

Part of those medieval cellars survives, including a vault carried by a central pillar. The frontage was remade in the early seventeenth century in the Baroque manner, with the dramatic, decorative character fashionable at the time. Around seventeen thirty, its owner J. J. von Blanckenhagen added an elaborate entrance surround.

That portal was shifted to the rear after eighteen seventy; the house then kept that appearance until the same year. War in nineteen forty-five destroyed the building completely. The reconstruction was finished after nineteen fifty-five, following Edmund Małachowicz’s design and historic drawings and images, recreating its appearance around eighteen seventy.

The present front doorway’s portal came from townhouse number thirteen. The Silesian painter and printmaker Bodo Zimmermann also made his home here.