National Museum - Palace of Bishop Erasmus Ciolek
Renaissance bishop's mansion housing rare medieval sculpture and one of Central Europe's finest Orthodox icon collections.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Palace of Bishop Erasmus Ciolek in Kraków starts in the early 1500s, when the bishop shared his own mansion with a Bavarian printer named Florian Ungler, who set up a press inside these walls and produced the first book ever printed entirely in Polish, working out how to mark the language's hissing sounds with accents still used today. It follows the building three centuries on, when Austrian authorities seized it and turned the same rooms into a police station and then a prison. Listen for how the story turns again before the palace became part of the National Museum in 1996.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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