Goetz Palace: The Goetz-Okocim Family Residence in Poland
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.8
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Poland
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Modern
- Civilizations
- Habsburg
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page12 sections
History
Goetz Palace is a Neo-Baroque and Neo-Rococo residence in Brzesko, Poland, built between 1898 and 1900 for Jan Albin Goetz and his wife, Zofia Jadwiga, née Countess Sumińska. Located near the Okocim Brewery, it became the home of the Goetz-Okocim family, whose industrial enterprise shaped the history of the town.
The Goetz-Okocim residence
The palace was known within the family as the “New Palace,” distinguishing it from the “Old Palace” that Jan Albin’s father, Jan Ewangelista Goetz, had built on the brewery grounds. Jan Ewangelista founded the Okocim Brewery near Brzesko in 1845. The main body of the new residence was completed in 1900 and occupied from that year.
Further expansion followed in 1908 and 1909. After the death of Ferdinand Fellner, Jan Albin commissioned an eastern wing, a winter garden, and a palm house based on a design by Leopold Simony of the Vienna Polytechnic. These additions enlarged the family residence and its associated spaces.
Family ownership and wartime occupation
When Baron Jan Albin Goetz Okocimski died in 1931, ownership of the palace and brewery passed to his son, Baron Antoni Jan Goetz. Before the Second World War, the residence received prominent guests, including Archduke Karl Stephan of Austria, Ignacy Mościcki, president of the Second Polish Republic from 1926 to 1939, and Professor Julian Nowak, a scientist and politician who later served as prime minister.
In 1939, Antoni Jan Goetz and his family left the estate and did not return. During the Second World War, the palace was used by an air-force headquarters, the headquarters of the South Group from 1941, an officers’ school, and a military hospital. It was also occupied by the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany. Parts of the palace collections were looted during the war.
Nationalization, schooling, and return
In 1944, the palace and its adjoining park were nationalized under the nationalization decree and transferred to the State Treasury. The building was then converted into a school, where the first classes took place on 12 April 1945. Several institutions used the palace over the following decades, including a general secondary school and an economic secondary school.
In 2002, Elisabeth Badeni challenged the legality of the nationalization. After the claims were later withdrawn, the heirs became eligible to purchase the property on preferential terms. A Brzesko County resolution of 26 June 2007 authorized a sale by tender while preserving the Goetz heirs’ right of first refusal. A notarial deed dated 30 November 2007 returned the former family residence to them, and the palace and adjoining grounds have been privately owned since 2008.
Goetz Palace was entered in Poland’s register of monuments under number A-351 on 8 February 1972. Its changing functions, from family residence to wartime headquarters and school, reflect the successive political and social transformations that affected the estate during the twentieth century.
Remains
The palace has a usable floor area of 5,594 square metres and combines Neo-Baroque and Neo-Rococo forms. Its central section and chapel were designed and built by the Viennese office of Fellner & Helmer, while the eastern wing contains the later winter garden, also called an orangery, and palm house.
Principal interiors
Entrance hall and reception rooms
The main entrance hall retains historic wooden stairs whose architectural treatment has been compared with the stairs of the Noblemen’s Casino in Lviv, completed in 1898. The interior also includes a library with a marble fireplace, a main hall containing a painting by Popiel, a Wooden Hall, and a Hunting Hall. A vestibule links the Wooden and Hunting halls and contains mirrors more than two metres high, including one with an elaborately decorated frame.
Chapel
A chapel stands at the rear of the palace. Its surviving features include an ornamental fresco, stained-glass windows, and a fragment of an original stained-glass panel. Two family memorial plaques remain inside. A commemorative plaque marking the construction of the New Palace is set into the western wall in front of the chapel. The chapel’s former Rococo altar was moved in 1945 to a church in Słotwina.
Eastern wing and palm house
The eastern wing, added in 1908 and 1909, includes the winter garden and palm house. The palm house has a glass dome and glass roof, together with an artificially constructed grotto made from volcanic rock. The palace also retains an ornamental relief on an external wall, chandeliers, richly decorated ceilings, decorated windows, and an ornamental garden sculpture behind the building.
Collections and park
Palace collections
During the estate’s period of prosperity, the palace contained period furniture, fireplaces, stoves, crystal chandeliers, sculptures, paintings, old weapons, hunting trophies from the hunts of Jan Albin and Antoni Jan Goetz, and a library collection. The paintings included works by Malczewski, Wyspiański, Boznańska, Fabijański, the two Kossaks, Popiel, Pochwalski, Tondos, and Giovanni Battista Salvi, the seventeenth-century Italian painter also known as Sassoferrato. Some collections remained in the palace after the war, while other holdings were transferred to the Natural History Museum of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków.
Landscape park
An English-style landscape park originally surrounded the palace across 40 hectares. Approximately 17 hectares of the former park survive beside a 27-hectare wooded area. The remaining park contains 43 tree species, including exotic varieties, and 12 shrub species. Its plantings include rhododendrons, Canadian hemlocks, American tulip trees, mock-oranges, barberries, maples, beeches, horse chestnuts, elms, alders, and oaks.
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