Pałac Małachowskich, Kraków

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.