Złota Kamienica, Gdańsk

Złota Kamienica is the lavishly ornamented townhouse before you, known in English as the Steffens House and also as Speimann’s House. It faces the Long Market at Długi Targ forty-one and forty-two, close to the Main City Hall and Artus Court. Notice the façade’s dense procession of figures, shields, and story panels.

Abraham van den Blocke’s workshop created its gilded stone reliefs, with Jan Voigt of Rostock identified as the likely maker of the battle scenes. Johann Speimann, mayor of Gdańsk, engaged van den Blocke to replace his house; the work ran from sixteen oh nine until sixteen eighteen. Speimann also used the house to exhibit his own collections, making it a cabinet of curiosities.

His coats of arms occupy the façade’s central area, amid rulers including Sigismund the Third Vasa and Władysław Jagiełło. In sixteen twenty-three, Speimann’s wife Judyta Maria received King Sigismund and Queen Anne of Austria here. The building was devastated in nineteen forty-five, then rebuilt using the surviving fragment of its façade: a narrow wall rising through three storeys.