Ujazdów Castle: A Baroque and Classicist Residence in Warsaw
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Poland
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russian
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Castle
On this page18 sections
History
Ujazdów Castle is a historic residence in Warsaw, Poland, built and repeatedly transformed by the rulers of Masovia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It stands on the site of the twelfth-century settlement of Jazdów, later becoming an early Baroque palace, a military institution, and a reconstructed centre for contemporary art.
Medieval Jazdów
Jazdów was established beside a road running through the Agrykola ravine toward a crossing of the Vistula. The Masovian Piast dynasty, the branch of the medieval Piast ruling house that governed Masovia, built a fortified settlement there. On June 23, 1262, an invasion led by Ostafij Konstantynowicz destroyed it.
In 1281, Duke Bolesław II attacked the stronghold, which was then held by his brother, Duke Konrad II. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, Konrad transferred the ducal seat from Jazdów to the area of Warsaw’s future Royal Castle. Jazdów subsequently declined as a political centre.
Renaissance residences and royal performances
In 1516, the Masovian duchess Anna lived at Jazdów with her sons, Stanisław and Janusz. Queen Bona Sforza, an Italian-born queen of Poland, ordered a large wooden manor and service buildings in 1548. They stood approximately 120 metres north of the present castle.
Queen Anna Jagiellon and her husband, Stephen Báthory, were associated with a second wooden manor built on the site of the present castle during the second half of the sixteenth century. On January 12, 1578, Jan Kochanowski’s tragedy The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys was performed at Ujazdów during the wedding of Jan Zamoyski and Krystyna Radziwiłł. Kochanowski was one of the leading Polish poets and playwrights of the Renaissance.
The Vasa palace and its destruction
After 1624, King Sigismund III Vasa began a masonry residence on the site, incorporating the ruins of the earlier castle of the Masovian princes. The two-storey early Baroque palace was intended for his son, the future King Władysław IV Vasa. Its design is attributed either to Matteo Castelli or to Costante Tencalla, although there is little evidence that the young prince used the residence.
The castle was plundered during the Swedish Deluge, the seventeenth-century Swedish invasion and occupation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A tradition claims that Carl Gustaf Wrangel ordered Skokloster Castle in Sweden to be modeled on Ujazdów, but this attribution remains a legend. After the destruction, Ujazdów ceased to serve as a royal residence.
Between 1659 and 1665, the building housed the mint of Titus Livius Boratini. It produced the small copper coin known as the boratynka, named after its mint-master.
Lubomirski ownership and the royal gardens
Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski acquired the castle in 1674 and altered its interiors. His son, Teodor Józef Lubomirski, later leased the property to King Augustus II the Strong. The king commissioned a new royal residence and associated landscape works.
The Piaseczyński Canal was constructed below the palace in 1717. Extending for 820 metres, it ran toward the Vistula. During the 1670s and the early eighteenth century, the surrounding gardens were refurbished and later divided into Ujazdów Park and the Royal Baths Park. The Łazienki Hermitage and Łazienki Palace were also built during this period.
Classicist reconstruction and military use
King Stanisław II August purchased the castle from the Lubomirski family in 1766 and ordered another reconstruction. Work on the main building and two Classicist outbuildings facing Aleje Ujazdowskie was suspended in 1772, when the king concentrated his building programme at the nearby Royal Baths. The reconstruction was nearly complete by 1784, but it was not finished.
In 1784, the property was transferred to the city for use as barracks for the Lithuanian Foot Guard. Under Stanisław Zawadzki, the building was reconstructed in the Classicist style, while its outbuildings were substantially enlarged. The complex later housed the 10th Foot Regiment and served as the main recruitment centre for the 20th Foot Regiment during the Kościuszko Uprising, the 1794 Polish-Lithuanian insurrection led by Tadeusz Kościuszko against Russian and Prussian control.
After the Partitions of Poland, the castle was abandoned during the Prussian occupation of Warsaw. Following the establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw, the Napoleonic-era Polish state created in 1807 from territories taken from Prussia, Ujazdów returned to military use as a hospital. The hospital officially opened on April 1, 1818, with capacity for up to 1,000 wounded soldiers.
During the November Uprising, the Polish insurrection against Russian rule that began in 1830 and was suppressed in 1831, the hospital expanded to 1,250 beds. A further annex for 600 people opened in the nearby Łazienki complex. After the uprising, the castle became primarily barracks for Russian military personnel, while a new central military hospital was built beside the future Ujazdów Park.
Changes from the nineteenth century to independence
The outbuildings were rebuilt around 1850 by Jerzy Karol Völck and partly demolished about twenty years later. In 1852, the main building was altered again and lost its decorative elements.
During the First World War, Russian authorities converted the castle into a provisional hospital. German forces occupied it in 1915. On April 10, 1917, the building was transferred to the Polish Legions, Polish military formations serving with the Central Powers in the hope of restoring Polish independence. It became the principal military hospital for Polish units fighting alongside that coalition.
After Poland regained independence in 1918, the interior was altered once more. From the 1920s, several sections of the Warsaw NCO school were housed there. An NCO was a non-commissioned officer. The principal staircase was restored to its eighteenth-century representative design. After the Polish Defensive War of 1939, the Red Cross organized a school in the castle for wounded, ill, and injured soldiers.
Wartime destruction and reconstruction
German forces burned and heavily damaged Ujazdów Castle after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. In 1954, the Communist authorities ordered the demolition of its walls, leaving the cellars and ground-level relics. Proposals for a Central Military House, a theatre connected with the People’s House of the Polish Army, and a Marxism-Leninism evening university were not realized. Some surviving pavilions served as storage facilities during the 1960s.
The remaining ground-level and cellar fabric was conserved in 1962. The present castle is a reconstruction based on the eighteenth-century design and associated with the project of Piotr Biegański. The rebuilt building has housed Warsaw’s Centre for Contemporary Art since 1985.
Ujazdów Castle is protected as an architectural heritage monument. It entered the provincial register in 1959 and received protection as an immovable monument in 1965. It was added to the municipal monument register in 2012 and recognized in 1994 as a Historic Monument of Poland within the historic centre of Warsaw, the Royal Route, and Wilanów.
The Centre for Contemporary Art maintains collections and presents temporary exhibitions, concerts, and educational workshops in the reconstructed castle. An association founded in 1995 gathered objects connected with the history of Ujazdów Castle and its military hospital. These materials were exhibited periodically from 2000 and organized as a museum in 2003, with multimedia and study sections inside the castle.
Remains
Ujazdów Castle is a residential complex in a Baroque-Classicist, or Baroque-Neoclassical, style. It occupies the edge of an eastward-projecting terrace of the Warsaw escarpment, aligned with a bend in the Vistula. This position provided an eastward view and made the residence a landmark for river vessels approaching Warsaw. The castle stands in the historic Ujazdów district between Ujazdów Park and the Royal Baths Park.
The palace and courtyard
Early Baroque residence
The masonry residence begun after 1624 was organized around an internal courtyard. Its two wings were connected by arcaded galleries, and six-sided, two-storey corner towers marked the building’s angles. The entrance was described in 1643 as being decorated with four marble lions. One marble lion associated with Ujazdów, attributed to an anonymous Italian artist and dated to the 1630s, is preserved at Drottningholm Palace.
Eighteenth-century alterations
The present complex incorporates several earlier construction phases. During the eighteenth-century redesign, the eastern and western facades were raised by an additional storey. Outbuildings associated with Tylman of Gameren were rebuilt to the height of the main building, creating a large courtyard. Two further Classicist outbuildings were constructed on the side facing Aleje Ujazdowskie.
Outbuildings and military memorials
Expanded outbuildings
The outbuildings were enlarged between 1784 and 1789, when the castle was converted into barracks. They were rebuilt again around 1850 and later partly demolished. Their surviving elements form part of the complex reconstructed around the main castle.
Restored staircase and memorials
The principal staircase was restored in the 1920s to its representative eighteenth-century appearance. Stone tablets installed there on May 15, 1927, commemorate Polish military medics who died in wars between 1797 and 1920. Additional tablets commemorate Karol Kaczkowski and Zdzisław Lubaszewski, while a sculpture by Edward Wittig commemorates military medics as a group.
Canal and reconstructed fabric
Piaseczyński Canal
The Piaseczyński Canal lies below the castle and extends toward the Vistula. Together, the canal and castle form part of the Stanislavian Axis, an urban composition of parks and palaces in Warsaw’s southern outskirts.
Postwar reconstruction
The castle was burned and damaged in 1944, and its walls were demolished in 1954. The surviving physical fabric consisted of the cellars and ground-level relics. The present building was reconstructed in 1973 and 1974 according to Piotr Biegański’s eighteenth-century design. Its exhibition spaces are now used by the Centre for Contemporary Art for collections, temporary exhibitions, concerts, and educational workshops.
