Cloth Hall

The first building to be erected here was built of stone soon after the city received its Great Charter in 1257. The traces of that edifice are only preserved in the cellars. In the second half of the 14th century, the city mason, Marcin Lindintolde, built a solid hall – roofed and propped with buttresses – in the centre of the Main Square. Designed for trading cloth, it received a privilege from King Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki), which forced merchants arriving in the city to sell their own goods to sell them only in the building. Inside, the hall was filled with stalls. Outside, parallel to the Cloth Hall – from the side of ul. Szewska – there was a row of shoemakers and a tanners’ shambles. On the other side, that is from the mouth of ul. Sienna, a considerable space was taken up by the 64 “rich” stalls and shambles set up in two rows, where virtually everything was traded. This Gothic building burned in the Great Fire of the City in 1555.

The reconstruction completed in 1559 gave the Cloth Hall Renaissance architectural form, making it one of the most famous examples of the style in Kraków. The Gothic hall was bisected to half of its height by the addition of barrel vaulting, and the top storey thus produced was earmarked for trading a variety of goods, and referred to as smatruz. It was accessible by roofed staircases with loggias, situated on the shorter sides of the building. The main architectural feature of the building was the arcaded parapet wall (designed by Giovanni Maria Padovano), which concealed the sunken roof. The parapet wall was topped with a fanciful crest bearing mannerist gargoyles, probably designed by Santi Gucci.

With the passage of time, the Cloth Hall – never again overhauled or restored – was losing its lustre. Photographs from the 19th century show a nearly derelict building with wooden hovels all attached to it: thus Kraków burghers' Pearl of the Renaissance became hardly recognizable at all among them. The building continued in that form until its major overhaul in 1875-1879. The designer, Tomasz Pryliński, added pointed-arch arcades, which have ever since housed elegant shops and cafés. The technical curio of the time was the gas lighting that has remained operational up until today. A gallery of Polish painting, the seedcorn of the National Museum, was opened on the upper floor in 1883. The Art Nouveau interior of the Jan Noworolski café with murals by Józef Mehoffer and Henryk Uziembło is worth a look.

In the passage situated in the central part of the building, close to the Mickiewicz monument, there hangs a large iron knife on a chain: a sign of the Law of Magdeburg reminding people that thieves are punished by having their ear cut off. The knife found another explanation in a legend about the two brothers building the towers of St Mary’s. When one of them realised that his tower could never become as high as the other – due to his failure to provide sufficiently solid foundations – he killed his brother with this very knife in a fit of envy. Yet remorse after the fratricide brought him to his own death, which he met by jumping from the (lower) tower that he had built himself.