Przegorzały Castle
Kraków Monuments
A building on a hill in Przegorzały, built during the Second World War, one of the few works of Third Reich architecture in Kraków. Its design is dated 1 October 1941, and the building was called Schloss Wartenberg. The construction was initiated by Otto Wächter, governor of the Kraków district during the occupation. The castle stands next to the slightly older Villa Baszta, a semicircular building raised at the end of the 1920s by Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz. Today it houses a hotel and a restaurant.
History
Przegorzały Castle stands on a hill above the Vistula valley and was built during the Second World War. It is one of the few works of Third Reich architecture in Kraków. While it was being built it was called Schloss Wartenberg.
The building was initiated by Baron Otto Wächter, governor of the Kraków district during the occupation. For his summer residence he had set his sights on the neighbouring Villa Baszta - a semicircular house that the architect Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz built for himself in 1928-1929, on a plot bought in 1916 from the Camaldolese monks of Bielany. Szyszko-Bohusz refused to lease or exchange the land, and in December 1940 he was arrested on a made-up pretext. The Germans took over the villa.
The design of the new castle is dated 1 October 1941. The building was to be styled on the Rhineland castles of the Romantic period. Wächter fitted out his residence lavishly, under the pretext of building a sanatorium. Szyszko-Bohusz himself was forced to draw up and personally sign the design; the drawings also bear the names of two Austrian architects, Richard Pfob and Hans Petermair. Construction began in 1942, but after the Wächters left for Lviv the building stood abandoned until 19 November 1943, when Hans Frank gave it to Heinrich Himmler.
On 18 January 1945 the Red Army took Kraków. At the end of the war the building housed a hospital, and the Bohusz family tried in vain to recover the property. In 1952 the whole complex was taken over by the Forest Research Institute, and in 1973 it was decided to house the Jagiellonian University's Institute of Polish Diaspora Research there. Later the castle was the seat of two Jagiellonian University institutions: the Institute of European Studies and the Centre for Holocaust Studies. Today it is home to a hotel and a restaurant, and its terraces offer a panorama of south-western Kraków and the Beskid mountains.
Did you know?
The Germans planned to link the castle with a road about 100 metres below by a cable car. The plans came to nothing, because in January 1945 the Red Army entered Kraków.