The Palace on the Isle
Why is it significant?
Stand on the shore and let your eyes travel across the water to the palace: white walls, a colonnade, statues along the roofline, and its reflection lying perfectly still in the lake below. This is the Palace on the Isle, and the whole park is named after what it used to be.
Key Facts
| Place | The Palace on the Isle |
|---|---|
| Address | Łazienki Królewskie, ul. Agrykola 1, 00-460 Warszawa, Poland |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.21510, 21.03580 |
| Part of Walk | Warsaw's Green Royal Route: Aleje Ujazdowskie to Łazienki Park, Chopin and the Palace on the Isle |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the shore and let your eyes travel across the water to the palace: white walls, a colonnade, statues along the roofline, and its reflection lying perfectly still in the lake below. This is the Palace on the Isle, and the whole park is named after what it used to be.
Łazienki means the baths. In the late seventeenth century the magnate Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski had a baroque bathhouse built on this island by the architect Tylman van Gameren, a pavilion of grottoes, fountains and mythological decoration. Soon after his election in 1764 King Stanisław August Poniatowski acquired the estate, and over some twenty years his architects Dominik Merlini and Johann Christian Kamsetzer wrapped the bathhouse in the elegant classical palace you see now.
It was his favourite place. He filled it with paintings, sculpture and a ballroom, and in summer some of his famous Thursday dinners were held here, where writers, scholars and artists talked about how to modernise a country that was running out of time. After the third partition in 1795 he abdicated and left Warsaw, and he died in Saint Petersburg in 1798, never seeing his palace again.
In December 1944, after the Uprising had been crushed, German troops set the palace on fire and drilled holes in its walls for explosives. The charges were never set off, perhaps for lack of time as the front approached. The interiors were gutted, but the walls stood, and the palace was patiently restored after the war.
Look out over the lake for a moment: carp drift under the bridges, ducks patrol the banks, and on the stone steps the peacocks sometimes pose as if they had been hired. This is the heart of the park, about seventy-six hectares of gardens, lakes and woods. Now walk along the southern lake shore a little way, to where rows of stone seats face the water.