Wilanów Palace
A thirty-minute bus journey south of Warsaw’s centre (or was it a tram?) will lead you here to Wilanów Palace – the former summer residence of the Polish Kings. John III Sobieski, the late-17th Century King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, commissioned some Italian architect to build a ‘modest’ country house outside the capital. Here’s the finished result, with a few subsequent extensions and artistic and architectural enhancements of course. Italianate baroque villas like this might seem a bit odd in an Eastern European country, but this palace survived the Polish partitions and both the World Wars, and is one of the best surviving reminders of the Poland that once was – before all the turmoil it went through in the next few centuries right up to the present era. Taken on 18 May 2016.
Wilanów Palace
A thirty-minute bus journey south of Warsaw’s centre (or was it a tram?) will lead you here to Wilanów Palace – the former summer residence of the Polish Kings. John III Sobieski, the late-17th Century King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, commissioned some Italian architect to build a ‘modest’ country house outside the capital. Here’s the finished result, with a few subsequent extensions and artistic and architectural enhancements of course. Italianate baroque villas like this might seem a bit odd in an Eastern European country, but this palace survived the Polish partitions and both the World Wars, and is one of the best surviving reminders of the Poland that once was – before all the turmoil it went through in the next few centuries right up to the present era. Taken on 18 May 2016.