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.

What you actually see

• 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.

Honest expectations

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.