Skład Solny, Kraków

Skład Solny before you is an eighteenth-century salt warehouse that now works as a cultural and artistic space. Built in 1787 beside Kraków’s former Salt Port on Na Zjeździe Street, it stands in Zabłocie, within Podgórze. Its location followed an exceptionally old commercial path: the thirteenth-century salt road carried salt from Wieliczka south through Nowy Targ and Czarny Dunajec.

In the late sixteenth century, roughly a third of the salt sold across Poland travelled by boat on the Vistula, making a loading base near Kraków highly valuable. This building first served the Kazimierz loading port as a storehouse for Wieliczka salt. It later became a dedicated salt depot; after that operation ended in the latter half of the nineteenth century, soldiers used it as barracks.

Since the nineteen nineties, the old warehouse has filled with artists’ workshops, music-production studios, craft businesses and art centres. Look at the building as a working shell rather than a sealed historic exhibit: exhibitions and workshops still take place here each year during Kraków’s Krakers art week. In 2019, the Wiewiórka contemporary-art centre hosted an exhibition about Zabłocie’s studio history, bringing together twenty-nine artists who had once worked in the district; it won the festival’s top prize.