Royal Castle in Warsaw

The Royal Castle closes the southern side of Castle Square at the entrance to Warsaw's Old Town, a long brick-red façade crowned by the slender Sigismund Tower. Its origins lie in the fortress of the dukes of Masovia: the Curia Maior, or Great House, was built in 1407–1410 under Duke Janusz I. When Masovia passed to the Polish Crown in 1526 the castle became a royal residence, and after Sigismund III Vasa moved the court to Warsaw the Italian architects Giovanni Trevano, Giacomo Rodondo, Paolo del Corte and Matteo Castelli rebuilt it in 1598–1619 as a five-winged palace around an irregular courtyard, its clock tower rising some 60 metres.

The castle's golden age came under Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. Domenico Merlini and Jakub Fontana remodelled the state rooms in a refined neoclassical manner, and the court painter Marcello Bacciarelli filled them with allegorical ceilings and royal portraits. One room was hung with Bernardo Bellotto's precise views of Warsaw, still called the Canaletto Room; those paintings later became an essential guide for rebuilding the city. In the Senate Chamber the Great Sejm adopted the Constitution of 3 May 1791, Europe's first modern written constitution and the second in the world after that of the United States.

The castle's greatest drama is its survival as an idea. German artillery set it ablaze on 17 September 1939, and after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 the ruins were deliberately blown up. Museum workers and conservators, at great personal risk, had carried out paintings, carved door frames, marble fireplaces and architectural fragments, and these became the core of the reconstruction: between 1971 and 1984 the castle was rebuilt, financed largely by donations from all over Poland, to its 17th- and 18th-century form. In 1980 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with the Old Town as an example of near-total reconstruction.

Inside, the royal apartments, the Great Assembly Hall and the Marble Room have been recreated with original fittings wherever they survived. The collection includes the Lanckoroński gift of 1994, which brought two paintings by Rembrandt, "The Girl in a Picture Frame" and "The Scholar at the Lectern", to Warsaw.

Getting there

The castle stands on Castle Square (Plac Zamkowy) in central Warsaw, beside the Sigismund Column, about 2 km from the city centre. Warsaw Chopin Airport (WAW) is about 10 km away.