Piotr Skrzynecki, Kraków

Here in Kazimierz, at Skawińska 8, this bronze monument honors Piotr Skrzynecki, the creator and driving force behind the cabaret Piwnica pod Baranami. Karol Gąsienica Szostak made the sculpture, unveiled on the twenty-seventh of November 1998 outside the Jagiellonian University Medical College’s Second Department of Internal Medicine. Notice that the memorial does not portray a conventional solitary hero.

It shows two acrobats: a man balancing on shifting blocks, with a woman poised on his right shoulder and her arms raised. In his outstretched left hand he carries a bell, Skrzynecki’s inseparable emblem; the pedestal is inscribed “In memory of Piotr Skrzynecki.” Professor Andrzej Szczeklik funded it in tribute to a friend who had also been his patient for almost two decades.

Skrzynecki was born in Warsaw in 1930, studied art history at the Jagiellonian University, and founded the student club that developed into Piwnica pod Baranami in 1956. He remained its central figure until his death in Kraków in 1997. The cabaret became a defining cultural symbol of postwar Kraków, celebrated especially for satire that challenged the communist authorities.