Kazimierzowski Palace & the Chopin Annex
Why is it significant?
In front of you is a long, calm, white palace with a classical portico, the seat of the university's rector. On either side stand two lower buildings, the annexes. Find the one on the right as you face the palace: the Chopins lived there from 1817 to 1827.
Key Facts
| Place | Kazimierzowski Palace & the Chopin Annex |
|---|---|
| Address | Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warszawa, Poland |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.24070, 21.02030 |
| Part of Walk | Chopin's Warsaw: A Walk Through the Composer's Home Town |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you is a long, calm, white palace with a classical portico, the seat of the university's rector. On either side stand two lower buildings, the annexes. Find the one on the right as you face the palace: the Chopins lived there from 1817 to 1827.
This is the Kazimierzowski Palace, built in the seventeenth century as a royal summer villa and named after King Jan Kazimierz, who rebuilt it. In the 1760s it became the Knights' School, the military academy where a young Tadeusz Kościuszko studied. And from 1817 it housed the Warsaw Lyceum, a school for boys, where Fryderyk's father, Nicolas Chopin, a Frenchman from Lorraine, taught French.
Nicolas also ran a boarding house for pupils from landed families, so the Chopin flat was always full of boys, books and noise. In the middle of it all a small, pale child sat at the piano. His first composition, a polonaise in G minor, was printed in 1817, when he was seven. Later, from 1823, he studied at the Lyceum himself, and his summer holidays at a schoolfriend's country estate gave him his first deep taste of the folk mazurka.
It was not all sunshine. In 1827 his little sister Emilia, a gifted girl who wrote poems and plays with her brother, died of tuberculosis in these rooms, aged fourteen. The family could not bear to stay, and moved across the street to the palace you have just seen. Tuberculosis would follow Fryderyk too... it is the disease usually blamed for his own death in Paris.
Behind the palace you are on the edge of the escarpment, where the ground drops away toward the Vistula. Kings came here for the view, schoolboys for their lessons, and a genius for his childhood. Head back through the gate, turn right along Krakowskie Przedmieście, and stop at the white church with the tall baroque facade.