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• Old Market Square guide

The palace represents a unique architectural solution within the old city walls. It was erected by an unknown architect in the 1870s on two mediaeval plots with a small garden at the rear, only to be rebuilt a decade later by Antoni Hoene in a mixture of Baroque and neoclassical styles.

Judging from the decoration on the gable end, which features a coat-of-arms flanked by Roman soldiers and panoply, the first owner of the palace, the Great Lithuanian Marshall Kazimierz Gurowski, must have been a man of lofty aspirations (the bass-reliefs in the attic depicting triumphant parades and sacrificial processions and the sculpture of a pelican feeding her young with her own blood, which is placed on the top of the building are a later amendment. They were placed there during the period of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw as a symbolic representation of a homeland hoping to regain independence).

The magnificent Red Room was richly decorated with stucco work, most likely designed by Jan Christian Kamsetzer. There are also royal portraits of Stefan Batory, Władysław vthe Fourth and Jan the Third Sobieski over the doors and also two pairs of statues. The statues made by Augustyn Schöps depicted the kings Władysław the Elbow-high and Casimir the Great, and Władysław Jagiełło and Duke Witold (or according to an alternative interpretation ,Mieszko I and Boleslav the Brave). The replicas of the statues destroyed during the war were made by Józef Kopczyński.

The palace inherited by the Działyński family became an important centre of Polish life, where public lectures were given, art and craft exhibitions were organised and support committees were founded during uprisings.

The Działyńskis have gone down in history thanks to the library that Tytus Działyński founded in Kórnik near Poznań. The library incorporated examples of Polish literature and was vastly expanded through the efforts of his son Jan and his grandson Władysław Zamoyski, who bestowed the entire property upon the Polish nation in 1924.