Wartenberg Castle

Brief Information

Wartenberg Castle looks like a reference to old Rhine castles, but it appeared not in the Romantic era, but during the Second World War. This stylization is important: the building does not continue the local medieval history, but shows how the occupying power tried to give the new residence the appearance of a long-established castle.

Today the castle houses the Institute of European Studies and the Center for Holocaust Studies of Jagiellonian University, while the ground floor contains a café and a restaurant. This present-day layer contrasts especially strongly with the building’s wartime origins: a place conceived as a residence and then handed over to the SS as a sanatorium is now connected with university research.

What to Notice First

It makes sense to compare the castle itself with the neighboring Tower Villa. The original history of the site begins precisely with it: Otto Gustav Wächter wanted to occupy the villa, but its owner, the architect Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz, refused. After his arrest and release, he was already working on the design for the new castle. Therefore, the proximity of the two structures reads not as an accidental pair, but as a trace of the conflict from which the new building grew.

Two things are important about the castle itself: its stylization after Middle Rhine Romantic castles and its terrace. The first explains the historicizing appearance of a building constructed in the twentieth century; the second has become its main modern attraction, because it offers a view of the south-western part of Kraków, the Vistula, and the Orava Beskids with Babia Góra. Here the building’s past is read through its form, and its present through how it is used and from where people look out over the city.