Pod Murzynem, Wrocław

Pod Murzynem is the historic townhouse on the corner of Kiełbaśnicza and Ruska streets, with a medieval lineage. At the corner of its first floor, the old house emblem takes the form of three sculpted figures. The fuller historic name, Pod Trzema Murzynami, was first recorded in the first half of the nineteenth century; at that time the emblem consisted of three painted figures, with the central one given a fully modelled head.

Its story begins with two separate, double-depth houses built here in the fourteenth century. Around seventeen hundred they were joined into one building and given a Baroque façade—the theatrical, ornament-rich manner of that period. A further storey was added in eighteen fifty-eight.

After a fire in March nineteen oh eight, repairs brought a mansard roof, with its steep double slope and projecting roof windows, and removed part of the earlier Baroque decoration. The building suffered wartime damage and was later restored in Baroque-inspired forms. It then stood empty from the nineteen eighties until a major late-nineteen-nineties renovation revived its principal architectural features and returned the three-figure emblem to the corner.