Teatr im. Juliusza Słowackiego, Kraków

The Juliusz Słowacki Theatre is a historic Kraków theatre and opera house, opened in 1893 and designed by Jan Zawiejski. Its eclectic, neo-Baroque-inspired design drew on major European theatres. The venue became a key stage for Young Poland drama and Stanisław Wyspiański’s landmark productions.

The lavish façade before you belongs to the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, Kraków’s nineteenth-century theatre and opera house. It opened in 1893 as the Municipal Theatre and took the Romantic poet and dramatist Juliusz Słowacki’s name in 1909. Designed by Jan Zawiejski, it is eclectic in the literal sense: a building that combines the visual languages of earlier periods, here with neo-Baroque theatrical splendour.

The design took inspiration from leading European theatres, including Paris’s Palais Garnier. Notice the ornament across the theatre’s façade: this was Kraków’s first building planned and fitted with electric lighting. That modern technology arrived on a site with a much older past.

A fourteenth-century Church and monastery of the Holy Ghost once stood here; the city cleared it to build the theatre, provoking fierce argument, and painter Jan Matejko vowed never again to show his paintings in Kraków. The opening programme on the twenty-first of October 1893 joined works by Mickiewicz, Słowacki and Fredro. Soon this stage became central to Young Poland theatre and to Stanisław Wyspiański’s dramas.

His first production of all parts of Mickiewicz’s Dziady came here in 1901, and the premiere of Wyspiański’s Wesele that same year became a landmark of Polish culture. In 1978, the theatre entered the World Heritage listing together with Kraków’s historic centre.