Bishop Erazm Ciołek Palace

What to expect

This is where Krakow keeps its medieval sacred art, and almost nobody goes. The Bishop Erazm Ciolek Palace at Kanonicza 17 has been a branch of the National Museum since 2007, five minutes downhill from Wawel on the prettiest street in the city. Three permanent galleries fill three floors, from the cellars to the first floor. The rooms are dark and quiet, objects lifted out of shadow by spotlights.

The first floor holds Art of Old Poland, 12th-18th century: around 300 works drawn from a collection of some 2,000, according to the daily Rzeczpospolita. The star is the Madonna of Kruzlowa, a lime-wood carving from about 1410 and one of the International Gothic “Beautiful Madonnas”. Nearby stand Veit Stoss’s Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, taken from St Mary’s Basilica, and two-metre figures of Mary and St John from a rood beam. One room is blacked out, plays funeral music and displays coffins and coffin portraits - the Sarmatian way of death, at full scale.

The ground floor is the icon gallery. Church Art of the Old Commonwealth shows icons from the 15th to the 19th century, an 18th-century iconostasis and liturgical textiles, and it is routinely called the finest collection of its kind in Poland. In the cellars, Krakow Within Reach lays out 800 carved stone fragments from St Mary’s and the cathedrals of Krakow and Gniezno, arranged so that you can put your hands on them.

Come if medieval and early-modern religious art is why you travel, or if you want to stand in front of one famous sculpture without a crowd between you and it. Skip it if you are travelling with children under ten - there is no interactive content, and the coffin room upsets some of them. The quiet is real: 43 TripAdvisor reviews in nearly twenty years says less about the ratings, mostly excellent, than about how few people find the door.

Tips

• Tuesday is the day. The permanent exhibitions are free on Tuesdays, and Tuesday is also the only day the palace stays open until 18:00. From Wednesday to Sunday it closes at 16:00, which ruins a lot of afternoon plans.
• Last admission is 20 minutes before closing. On a normal day that means reaching the ticket desk by 15:40. This catches out more visitors than anything else here.
• Allow 90 minutes. That covers both main galleries without rushing; two hours if you take in the cellars and the reconstructed Hall of Virtues. An hour is enough if you have come only for the icons.
• Take the audio guide. Wall labels are sparse, and the recordings run in English, Polish, German, French and Russian for 7 PLN (5 PLN reduced).
• Tickets: 18 PLN, and no booking needed. Reduced 14 PLN, family 36 PLN, and anyone with a school or student card pays 1 PLN. There are no queues, so the desk works as well as the website; an online ticket carries no time slot and stays valid for three months.
• Blind visitors get equipment, not staff. The Polish Association of the Blind lists touchable copies of two Madonnas, a Braille guide, a marked tactile route and audio description triggered by an induction loop. The same audit records that no staff are trained to assist visually impaired visitors, so call ahead on +48 12 433 59 20.
• Pair it with the street, not another big museum. Kanonicza holds three museums along two minutes of cobbles; after 90 minutes of Gothic sculpture, the walk up to Wawel beats a second gallery.

Getting there

On foot: from the Main Market Square walk down Grodzka towards Wawel, then turn right into Kanonicza - ten minutes at an easy pace. From the foot of Wawel Hill it is two minutes.

Tram: the Wawel stop on Stradomska and the Plac Wszystkich Swietych stop on Grodzka are both about 400 metres away. Given how close the Main Square is, walking usually beats waiting.

By car: the palace has no car park and Kanonicza lies inside the Old Town restricted traffic zone. The nearest large option is the underground car park at Plac Na Groblach, ten minutes on foot around the hill.

Nearby

Two doorways along, at Kanonicza 19-21, the Archdiocesan Museum shows similar medieval church art for 10 PLN and adds the rooms Karol Wojtyla lived in. A hundred metres uphill begins Wawel Royal Castle , the city’s other early Renaissance residence and the cathedral that the reconstructed Padovano ciborium came from. Two minutes towards the Main Square, the Archaeological Museum of Krakow is down to a single hall during its rebuild. That makes it a sensible second stop on a day that gives 90 minutes to Kanonicza.

Background

The palace was built between 1501 and 1505 for Erazm Ciolek, bishop of Plock, canon of Krakow and secretary to King Alexander Jagiellon, who merged two older houses into the grandest residence on sixteenth-century Kanonicza. Bishop Piotr Tomicki and Cardinal Jerzy Radziwill later added side wings and a third storey, followed by a defensive wall and bastion.

The nineteenth century was unkind: under Austrian administration it housed a tax commission and an assay office, and fell into ruin. The National Museum took it over in 1996, restored it between 1999 and 2006 and opened the branch on 18 October 2007. The works uncovered a late Gothic colonnade dividing the entrance hall into two aisles; the Renaissance gateway carries an eagle with the interlaced “S” of King Sigismund I. After Wawel, it is the second early Renaissance building in Krakow.