Pszczyna Castle

Pszczyna is the exception among Polish residences: about eighty per cent of its original furnishing, decoration and collections are still in the rooms, because the house was taken over as a museum in 1946 with its contents largely intact rather than being emptied first. The building is medieval in origin, remodelled in the 1870s for the Hochberg family of Ksiaz in a French neo-baroque manner by Hippolyte Destailleur, and the state rooms - the mirrored hall with its chandeliers, the armoury, the library, the staircase - read as a complete late-nineteenth-century aristocratic interior rather than a reassembled one. Daisy, Princess of Pless, an English-born Hochberg wife known for her diaries, lived here and much of the material about her is in the museum. The park behind runs to a hundred and fifty hectares in the English manner, with a small enclosure of European bison kept on the edge of town.

History

In the early Middle Ages Pszczyna was a stronghold of the Piast dukes, and it belonged to Lesser Poland until 1177; in 1548 the residence was sold to the Promnitz family from Saxony. The composer Georg Philipp Telemann became Kapellmeister to Erdmann II of Promnitz in 1705 and spent long periods here, studying Polish and Moravian folk music; in 1848 the Duchy of Pless became a principality of the Hochberg family, the French architect Hippolyte Destailleur rebuilt the palace in 1870-1876, and in May 1946 it became a museum (Wikipedia, Pszczyna Castle).

The main sights

• Furnishings largely intact - around eighty per cent of the original contents in place.
• The mirrored hall - the centrepiece of the 1870s neo-baroque remodelling.
• Princess Daisy's rooms - the English-born Hochberg and her diaries.
• A bison enclosure - in the hundred-and-fifty-hectare park.

When to go

April to October. A day.

What to expect

Entry is timed and the route is fixed; summer weekends sell out. Photography inside is charged. The bison enclosure is a separate ticket at the edge of the park. Closed Mondays.

Nearby

Tychy and Katowice are north; Bielsko-Biala is south.

Key facts