Pałac Wołodkowiczów, Kraków

Pałac Wołodkowiczów is the grand nineteenth-century residence at Lubicz 4, near Kraków Główny station. It was built in 1884 for Bolesław and Zofia Wołodkowicz, landowners whose family came from Poland’s eastern borderlands. The Kraków architects Tadeusz Stryjeński and Władysław Ekielski designed it in an eclectic manner, mixing historical references and taking particular inspiration from French architecture.

Notice the family’s Radwan coat of arms set into the attic above the façade. This address already had a remarkable collecting history. An earlier small palace here belonged to Piotr Stanisław Moszyński, who assembled art, archives and a library from patriotic conviction.

His ground floor held roughly thirteen thousand catalogued library and archive entries, alongside about thirty thousand prints, maps, coins and seals. Upstairs were ceramics, portrait paintings and archaeological objects, while the dining room displayed old weapons. Jan Matejko, Walery Eljasz-Radzikowski and Florian Cynk all used these collections.

Before the First World War, the palace belonged to Bogdan Ogiński. In June 1939, several rooms housed the Ethnographic Museum. A restoration begun in 2018 renewed the exterior and reshaped the interior for retail and service use.