Pałac na Wyspie, Warsaw

Pałac na Wyspie is the palace before you, placed on a man-made island amid the water in Warsaw’s Royal Baths park. Notice the colonnades along the bridges, which link the palace with the grounds. The building began life as a richly ornamented bathing pavilion commissioned by Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski and completed in the late seventeenth century.

King Stanisław August Poniatowski later transformed that pavilion into his summer home, with Domenico Merlini shaping the palace seen here. In the dining room, the king gathered leading figures of Poland’s Enlightenment for his celebrated Thursday meals. The calm surface of the water conceals a brutal chapter.

In the autumn of nineteen forty-four, German forces removed furnishings, set the interiors ablaze, and bored about a thousand holes in the walls for dynamite. The explosion never happened. Reconstruction began after the war and concluded in nineteen sixty-five, restoring the palace’s elaborate rooms for visitors. The surviving building carries both the pleasure of a royal retreat and the remarkable fact of its escape from deliberate annihilation.