Pałac Małachowskich, Kraków

Pałac Małachowskich is a historic townhouse on Kraków’s Main Market Square, created when three older houses were united into an eighteenth-century residence for Piotr Małachowski. Its Baroque entrance portal, older Renaissance portals, timber ceilings, and traces of classical decoration preserve hints of its former grandeur.

At the corner of Main Market Square and Szewska Street, Pałac Małachowskich is the historic townhouse at number thirty. What now reads as a single palace began as three houses joined and remade together: the Cyglarowska, Kortynowska, and Ryntowska houses. In the later eighteenth century, Piotr Małachowski, Kraków’s voivode, commissioned the new residence for his distinguished Polish family.

A plan of the square made in September seventeen eighty-seven already records its spacious entrance hall, staircase, and large ground-floor rooms. The doorway is the best surviving signal of that grand past: its decorated Baroque portal remains, along with fragments of restrained classical ornament elsewhere in the building. Inside the former residence, two Renaissance portals and seventeenth-century timber ceilings survived from the older houses it absorbed.

After the Second World War, nineteenth-century paintings in the Pompeian manner were uncovered, offering a glimpse of its once richly furnished interiors. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, repeated changes of owner and use steadily stripped away its aristocratic role; the ground floor became space for shops and food businesses. The building entered the heritage register on the third of November nineteen sixty-five.