Stary Spichlerz, Kraków

Stary Spichlerz is the former granary at Plac Sikorskiego 6. It was built in the eighteenth century just beyond Kraków’s defensive walls, a working building placed at the old city’s edge. Its first job was storing grain.

During the nineteenth century, the Jabłonowski family owned it, before selling it to the city in 1905. Before the Second World War, the building became the headquarters of the Architects’ Association—an unexpected chapter for a structure made for supplies rather than design. In the nineteen sixties, Kraków’s National Museum received it for the storage of antique furniture.

Renovation then gave the old granary a public cultural role: in 2013 it opened as Europeum, a National Museum branch exhibiting European art. Since 2021, it has housed the Stanisław Wyspiański Museum. That long sequence—from grain, through architecture and museum storage, to art—makes this modest old storehouse a compact record of how Kraków repeatedly finds new work for its historic buildings. It has also been protected in the heritage register since 2002.