Garbary and Karmelicka Street

The area situated behind Shoemaker’s Gate, known as Piasek, has belonged to princes and kings since the 14th century. Yet in 1363, King Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) sold the rights to it to the Municipality of Kraków. The largest city jurydyka of Garbary – a suburban borough that had its own administration but was subordinate to the authorities of Kraków – had already developed on the site early in the 15th century. It was preferred by craftsmen thanks to the Rudawa River crossing Garbary and the access to its water that it provided. The Polish name for tanners, garbarze, who dominated the area, gave rise to the name of the area. It was also home to potters and krupnicy (producers of groats) and the location of the city mills, felt works, and grinding workshops. The entire settlement was gathered around the Carmelite Church. It gave its name to today’s main street leading across the suburb, which in the 14th-century was a fragment of an important route leading towards Silesia and further. Yet originally the street was divided into two parts. The first was known originally as Szeroka, that is, Broadway, and later Piaskowa and ran across the borough and was of “urban” character. The memory of that is provided by the town hall standing at No. 12 that has been preserved unchanged to this day as an 18th-century townhouse with a streamlined late baroque crest.

The more distant “rural” part of today’s Karmelicka Street was already called “the black street” in 1357, where there were never-ending gardens with diminutive manor houses and scattered village farms. Such a landscape continued until the 1870s, when the intensive development of Kraków swallowed every piece of available ground for dense development. Even though the street name “Karmelicka” was applied to the entire street, the other name “Czarna” – most probably connected to the nearby “black village” – Czarna Wieś – continued to be used for many years.

The beginning of the street, starting from the city end, is dominated by the building of the Bagatela Theatre established in 1919. Today’s modernised facade is the result of a number of later reconstructions. Somewhat further away from the centre, at the corner of Rajska Street, huge barracks were built in the 1690s when Kraków was being redeveloped into a fortress. In 1996, they were turned into the headquarters of the regional public library.

Prominent among the many beautiful townhouses standing further down the street is the original “House under the Spider” at No. 35, built at the corner of Batorego Street in 1889. Its architect and owner was one of the most famous Kraków architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Teodor Talowski. The brick facade in Karmelicka Street, restless and full of surprises, is crowned with a parapet roof of the Dutch type, modelled on the mannerist house gables found in the cities of northern Europe and in Poland e.g. Gdańsk. Included in the finial of the parapet wall is the logo of the house: a spider in a cobweb, together with its date of construction and a fragment of a sundial. Attention is turned to the Latin inscription situated on the entablature under the first-floor bay window; translated into English, it reads “if God is with us, who is against us”