Kamienica Pod Złotą Kotwicą, Wrocław

Kamienica Pod Złotą Kotwicą, the House Under the Golden Anchor, is the oldest townhouse on the Market Square’s northern frontage, the stretch known as the Sweet Market. Its present six-bay façade, with three dormers above, belongs to a postwar rebuilding that returned the house to a mannerist character—the inventive, stylised late-Renaissance manner. The design was by Emil Kaliski.

This address has an exceptionally long architectural memory. A brick house first stood on plot fifty-two between the 1240s and 1280s, arranged as a modest building with two rooms. In the mid-fourteenth century it was extended northward, and the ground floor rooms received star vaults.

The patrician Uthamann family owned it in 1567 and reshaped it in the fashionable mannerist style of their day. The house later acquired a Baroque appearance in 1712, only to be demolished in 1887 and replaced by a building using French Neo-Renaissance or eclectic forms. It survived the fighting of 1945, but was taken down in the late 1950s and rebuilt. Inside, one remarkable survivor remains: a Renaissance column from the first half of the sixteenth century.