Kamienica Zajdliczowska, Kraków

Kamienica Zajdliczowska is a historic town house on Sławkowska Street in Kraków’s Old Town. Begun as a ground-floor medieval building, it grew through later centuries and gained its present eclectic façade in 1888. Its 1640 entrance portal, Marian figure and surviving interior painted ceiling preserve traces of that long evolution.

Kamienica Zajdliczowska is the historic town house at Sławkowska Street 4, also known over time as the Czeskis’ and Mączeńskis’ house. Its story begins in the fourteenth century, when it was only a ground-floor building. A first floor and rear wing arrived in the fifteenth century; the interior plan that became standard here took shape early in the sixteenth.

The building’s owners trace a compact history of Kraków society: a furrier, J. Cyrus, held it in the later sixteenth century, followed by the royal physician H. Gedecke.

The Zajdlicz family owned it from the later seventeenth century until 1716, giving the house its present name; the Mączeńskis followed. Notice the entrance portal in the ground floor. It dates from 1640, carries Latin sayings, and includes an eighteenth-century figure of the Virgin Mary.

Above, the symmetrical three-bay front is the result of the 1887–1888 remodelling, when a third floor was added and the façade acquired its eclectic character, combining elements borrowed from several earlier styles. Two surviving Gothic-Renaissance portals were removed then and taken to the Pusłowski Palace. Inside, a sixteenth-century painted ceiling survives, supported by a carved beam with Mannerist decoration. The house entered the heritage register on the eighth of December 1987.