Royal Castle - Warsaw, Poland
N 52° 14.862 E 021° 00.874
34U E 500994 N 5788588
The Royal Castle in Warsaw (Polish: Zamek Królewski w Warszawie) was the royal palace and official residence of the Polish monarchs, located in the Plac Zamkowy in Warsaw, at the entrance to the Old Town.
Waymark Code: WM57A3
Location: Mazowieckie, Poland
Date Posted: 11/23/2008
Views: 63
The personal offices of the king and the administrative offices of the Royal Court of Poland were located there from the 16th century until the Partitions of Poland. In its long history the Royal Castle was repeatedly devastated and plundered by Swedish, Brandenburgian, German, and Russian armies.
The Constitution of May 3, 1791, Europe's first modern codified national constitution, as well as the second-oldest national constitution in the world, was drafted here by the Four-Year Sejm. In the 19th century, after the collapse of the November Uprising, it was used as an administrative center by the Tsar. Between 1926 and World War II the palace was the seat of the Polish president, Ignacy Moscicki. After the devastation of World War II it was rebuilt and reconstructed.
Today it is a historical and national monument, and is listed as a national museum.
In 1595 king Sigismund III Vasa made a decision about the castle's expansion to public functions. Reconstruction in the early Roman baroque style was done between 1598–1619. The Castle was enlarged, and given its present five-sided shape, with an imposing early baroque elevation facing the town, and a high tower known as the Sigismund's Tower.
During the reign of Stanislaw August Poniatowski, the last Polish monarch, from 1764 to the third partition of Poland in 1795, the Royal Castle went through a period of greatness. The allocated money from the royal budget as well as the patronage which the king granted artists and the education and artistic taste of the ruler himself allowed for one of the most interesting reconstruction projects of the castle.
The restoration work began in 1915-1939, and accelerated after the end of World War I, when Poland regained its independence in 1918 following 123 year of partitions. The establishments of the Peace of Riga in 1921 let Poland retrieve some of the Castle collection from the USSR (which the Russian authorities took to Russia). The 1920s conservation and reconstruction works ware supervised by an architect and conservator Kazimierz Skórewicz. In 1928, he was replaced by another architect, Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz. Since 1926 the Royal Castle was the Polish president's residence.
In September 1939 the Castle burnt after the German bombing. During Warsaw's occupation the Castle was plundered by the Germans. German scholars, including Professor Dagobert Frey and Dr Joseph Mühlmann, took an active part in the work of destruction. The National Museum was allowed to keep only a few pieces of equipment to describe the losses and secretly document them with photographs. An art historian — Stanislaw Lorentz — was the one who supervised this process. On Hitler's orders, the Castle was due to be blown up at the beginning of 1940. The bomb unit drilled a number of holes to put dynamite in however, it was not (because of the protest of Italy) until after the Warsaw Uprising when this order was carried out.
Royal Castle in 1945. It was deliberately destroyed by the Germans in 1944.After its destruction in 1944 on German command orders, all that was left of the Castle was the ground floor, the lowest part of the Grodzka Tower and some remains of the Royal Library and Kubicki's Arcades. On 2 July 1949, Sejm put forward a plan of the Castle's rebuilding. However, the project was unpromising, considering the budgetary stringency and differing priorities of the communist authorities. Nevertheless, the Grodzka Gate has been reconstructed from the stone blocks kept in the National Museum during the war.
In 1964, the area surrounding the Castle was restored and two years later the Royal Castle's building has been rebuilt. On 20 January 1971, Sejm decided to restore the Castle again and created the Civil Committee of Rebuilding the Royal Castle in Warsaw. Building works supervised by an architect Jan Boguslawski, were financed in full with money coming from the Polish citizens. The reconstruction in its basic stage (restoration of the Castle to its state from before 1939) was completed in July 1974, however, the re-equipment (furnishings, paintings, works of art) and final works continued until 1988.
Nowadays, the Castle serves as the Museum and is subordinated to the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Many official visits and state meetings are held in the Royal Castle, too. Over 500,000 people visit the Royal Castle every year.
(Taken from wikipedia)
Accessibility: Partial access
Condition: Intact
Admission Charge?: yes
Website: [Web Link]
|