Disregarding the famous castle, cathedrals, market square and university, one could still spend years of their life (how many has it been now?) wide-eyed wandering the side streets of Kraków, tripping on cobbles, while taking in every architectural detail, every subtle flourish on every facade. Rhinoceroses, roses, elephants, eagles, peacocks, pears and ships with dropped anchors are just some of the many emblematic additions Cracovian architects have affixed to the facades of the city over the centuries in an effort to make each tenement unique and distinguishable from its neighbours; in fact, these embellishments essentially served as addresses in the days before building numbers and street names - a relatively modern innovation that didn’t take hold in Europe until as late as the mid-18th century.
Visitors to Kraków today will notice no shortage of buildings and businesses that still go by the medieval monikers established directly as a result of the decorations on their facades - Pod Jaszczurami (Under the Lizards, Rynek 8), Pod Baranami (Under the Rams, Rynek 27), Pod Aniołami (Under the Angels, ul. Grodzka 35), and so on. Some of these architectural details are quite subtle, while others are spectacularly strange and even whimsical. Which brings us neatly to one of the city’s most brilliant and unsung architectural talents: Teodor Talowski (take a bow, sir, this is your moment!).
'The Galician Gaudi'
Talowski attended school in Kraków before moving to Vienna and then Lviv, where he completed a masters degree in architecture. In 1881 he returned to Kraków, becoming a professor at the Technical University, and produced the most definitive works of his career here towards the close of the 19th century, before returning to Lviv in 1901 for a teaching position at the Polytechnic. After a long illness he died in 1910 at the age of only 53 and was buried in the family mausoleum in Kraków’s Rakowice Cemetery; the elaborate tomb, which he designed himself, features a large sphinx clutching a serpent-wreathed skull under its paw.
designed by Teodor himself. Photo by Zygmunt Put
Architect of Eccentric, Eclectic Vision
Not only was Talowski's career as an architect prolific, his work was also highly original - the product and projection of a singular vision. Generally defying stylistic categorisation, Talowski’s unconventional creations connected several architectural movements, incorporating elements of art nouveau, historicism, mannerism and modernism. In an attempt to place Talowski’s work within the recognised canon of architectural movements, he eventually became known by scholars as the founder of ‘eclecticism’ – an equivocal catch-all term for maverick architects whose work combined a variety of historic influences. Sadly for its founding father, however, eclecticism - owing to the very basic, but unspecific nature of its definition - proved to be a rather useless term in the art world and never caught on as an architectural movement, perhaps further validating Talowski’s vision as uniquely his own.
