Kamienica Pod Trzema Gwiazdami, Kraków

Kamienica Pod Trzema Gwiazdami is the historic townhouse at number thirty-two on Kraków’s Main Market Square. What now reads as a single building began as two separate houses: the Wolf Klein townhouse on the south side and the Sznuk townhouse on the north. They split apart near the end of the Middle Ages, then came back together in the seventeen-forties through the initiative of Facchinetti, a city juror.

In the entrance passage, the plaque in the keystone of the vault bears Wolf Klein’s initials and the year fifteen seventy. Merchant families owned his part of the property, and a third storey was added before the sixteenth century ended. In the early seventeenth century, the house received an early-Baroque makeover, including a portal in its front façade.

The northern house passed from the Cyrus family to the merchant Sznuks, then to councillor Jan Romanowicz and mayor Andrzej Cieniowicz. Much later, Bonawentura Winkler reshaped the combined property as his residence. Between nineteen eighty-five and nineteen ninety-five, a major restoration adapted it for Bank Pekao, added a fourth floor, and linked it closely with the corner building at Main Market Square thirty-one. The townhouse has been entered in the heritage register since the seventh of December nineteen sixty-five.