Royal Castle in Warsaw
— — a building rebuilt brick by brick from its own ashes.
Not only on a wall.
“The seat of the Polish kings on the eastern edge of the Old Town, above the Vistula. The Wehrmacht dynamited it in 1944 to leave nothing standing. From 1971 to 1984 the Poles rebuilt it from photographs, drawings, salvaged fragments, and the Bellotto cityscapes painted in the 1770s. The building you see today is not a reconstruction in the conservative sense. It is the city's answer to the destruction. — from the studio
Royal Castle in Warsaw, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Royal Castle, Zamek Krolewski, stands on Castle Square at the eastern edge of the Warsaw Old Town, above a bluff over the Vistula River. It served as the official residence of the Polish monarchs from the late 16th century, after Sigismund III Vasa moved the capital from Krakow in 1596, and as the seat of the Sejm until the partitions of the late 18th century. The 1791 Constitution of 3 May, the first codified constitution in Europe, was passed in its Senators' Chamber. The Old Town including the castle was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1980.
The castle was systematically destroyed by the German occupiers in two stages, first burned and stripped after the September 1939 bombardment, then dynamited in autumn 1944 after the Warsaw Uprising, on Hitler's specific order. Reconstruction did not begin until 1971, under a national subscription that drew donations from across Poland and the diaspora. The work finished in 1984. Many original fragments, salvaged and hidden by museum staff during the war, were returned to their places. The Bernardo Bellotto cityscapes painted in the 1770s served as the most exact reference for the exterior.
The castle museum is open daily except Mondays, with ticketing through the official site and seasonal hours that lengthen in summer. Two of the rebuilt rooms hold the canvases that guided the reconstruction, the Bellotto views of 18th-century Warsaw. Two original Rembrandts, the Scholar at His Writing Table and the Girl in a Picture Frame, are shown in the painting galleries, donated by the Lanckoronski family in 1994. The castle stands a short walk from the Sigismund Column, the river embankment, and the Stare Miasto market square.