Kamienica Pod Złotym Pucharem, Wrocław

Kamienica Pod Złotym Pucharem is a historic townhouse on Wrocław’s Market Square, with origins in two thirteenth-century houses. Its long history includes a Baroque remodelling, carved merchant symbols and the portrait of owner Bernhard Joseph Grund. The address also served as an inn, shops and a long-running pharmacy and cosmetics store.

Kamienica Pod Złotym Pucharem, the House beneath the Golden Cup, is a historic townhouse on the south side of Wrocław’s Market Square. Its site has been built up since the thirteenth century, when it likely held two narrower houses that were later joined into one L-shaped property. One of its oldest survivals is a stone devotional panel from the rebuilding of fifteen twenty-eight, set above the rear entrance.

It shows Christ with the instruments of the Passion, records that rebuilding, and includes the two donors who paid for it. The house acquired a grand Baroque redesign late in the seventeenth century. That campaign created a seven-bay front, crowned by a balustrade and a triangular pediment across its central section.

The façade changed repeatedly afterwards: in eighteen seventy it was extensively rebuilt, and work begun in nineteen thirteen added a storey and refashioned the front again. Notice the carved panels on the façade. One preserves the likeness of Bernhard Joseph Grund, who bought the building in seventeen fifty-eight; the others show a cart and a sailing ship, clear emblems of trade. Commerce has shaped this address for centuries: it was an inn until the seventeenth century, then housed a linen business, a colonial-goods shop, and, after nineteen forty-five, the Pod Złotym Pucharem pharmacy and cosmetics shop for decades.