Kamienica Pod Złotą Palmą, Wrocław

Kamienica Pod Złotą Palmą is the protected historic townhouse facing Wrocław’s Market Square along its northern frontage, known as Targ Łakoci. The building you see was created as a commercial house during the years nineteen oh six to nineteen oh seven. Its tall façade was designed to sell: broad display windows filled the lower part, while arched openings and pilasters gave the upper storeys a more formal rhythm.

This address has a much longer past than that façade suggests. A medieval house stood here by the late thirteenth century, with a timber forecourt later removed; around fifteen hundred it acquired a Gothic gable. A later rebuilding brought a Mannerist entrance portal with the house emblem, and the interior hall received moulded ceiling ornament.

From eighteen seventy-five, Priebatsch’s Buchhandlung operated here. Leopold Priebatsch installed an early Wrocław telephone in the house, numbered nine hundred and sixty. The bookshop remained under the Priebatsch family until nineteen thirty-three, when Hans Priebatsch and his family left for Jerusalem amid persecution of Jewish people. Let the older portal draw your attention: it is a surviving fragment from a building history repeatedly remade for trade, books, and city life.