The Secret Chambers of Poland’s Communist Regime

Welcome to The Secret Chambers of Poland’s Communist Regime. This is the title we have given to an exhibition exploring a little-known episode in the history of the Royal Castle. Following this unusual route, you will discover what the communist regime led by Edward Gierek wanted the Castle to become. On the second floor, you will see spaces that have never before been open to the public.

You are entering the Castle via the historic Deputies’ Staircase. During the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it led to the parliamentary chambers in the west wing, built under the Vasa dynasty. This was not, however, the official entrance to the government’s “guest wing”. Its elegant reception entrance was designed for the space now occupied by the ticket hall. A lift and staircase were installed behind what is now the ticket counter, providing convenient access to every floor of the state reception wing.

It was here, on the second floor of the Castle’s west wing, that an extensive residential area was to be created. It was divided into two zones. The first was to contain four hotel rooms for members of a foreign delegation. In the area we are now visiting, three spacious suites were fitted out: the principal suite and two intended for members of the guest’s entourage. Officially, the plans referred to foreign guests, heads of state and those accompanying them.

Yet in an early design study for the guest wing, Jan Bogusławski used a different and highly unusual phrase — albeit only once: “the Castle’s principal resident”. Who might he have had in mind? It is worth recalling what was happening at the highest levels of power at the time. From the beginning of Edward Gierek’s rule, and particularly in 1974, the leadership of the Polish United Workers’ Party had been debating reform of the political system. One proposal given serious consideration was the creation of the office of President of the Polish People’s Republic. Gierek himself reportedly wanted the post. Some Party officials saw this as a way of removing him from the Party’s direct leadership. The First Secretary, of course, intended to retain the power he already held. Ultimately, the key players failed to reach an agreement, and the constitutional amendment of 1976 did not address the presidency at all.

We cannot now determine whether the Party genuinely intended to create a palace in this wing for a “people’s president of Poland”. Yet the parallel is hard to ignore. In 1974 — the very year in which, according to witnesses, intensive work was under way on plans to restore the presidency — plans were also drawn up at the Castle for a residence with luxurious suites and extensive service facilities.

The original plans assigned an entirely different purpose to this area. It was to house the reconstruction archive’s collection and galleries for a major permanent museum exhibition. These were intended to display works of decorative art from the National Museum’s collections. Instead, from 1974 onwards, the area was fitted out as the so-called “guest wing”. Finishing work and technical inspections continued, almost through sheer momentum, into the early 1980s, but the suites were never brought into use. They were ultimately turned into offices for the Castle’s curatorial staff. Today, they house the Castle Archive, the Museum Inventory Department and the Royal Castle Department of Arts.

The plans for the guest rooms were abandoned at almost the very last moment. Fabrics and some of the furniture had already been purchased. The interior designers had not yet had time to select paintings or other decorative objects. The only ornaments they specified, and that the Castle actually acquired, were works in glass. In choosing them, Maria Referowska and Jan Maass opted for a striking contrast between the historically styled interiors and modern Polish design.

Original and vibrant in colour, these glass objects provide compelling evidence of the creative potential of artists working in the Polish People’s Republic. From surviving invoices, we know that around thirty glass works were purchased for the guest wing. Unfortunately, only two objects from that list remain in the Castle’s collection today.

From among the many designers active at the time, leading artists were chosen who experimented with form, technique and colour. They created individual, one-of-a-kind objects. You can admire works by one of them, Witold Turkiewicz, in the office of our colleague Dr Anna Szkurłat, curator of glass and porcelain.

We have arranged one half of the principal suite in accordance with rediscovered plans and the instructions left by its designers. We have used every original object we were able to locate. They were acquired by the Castle administration up to the end of 1979, while the building was still under reconstruction, and survived in offices and general storerooms. We have left the other half of the former suite unchanged to show how the Royal Castle Department of Arts normally uses this space. It is home to the Castle’s team of collection keepers and curators. Once the exhibition has closed and the renovation is complete, the curatorial staff will, of course, return to their offices.

The Castle administration intended to hang paintings from the National Museum’s collections on the walls of the principal suite. This became one of the points of contention. Today, recreating the intended appearance of these rooms offers an opportunity to display works of art from the collections of the Castle and the Ciechanowiecki Foundation that are not normally on view, including paintings dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

In keeping with the designers’ intentions, we have covered the walls with a fabric based on the damask they selected. The costly original silk had been commissioned to decorate the walls and throne of the Old Audience Chamber in the Royal Apartment.

The paintings on these walls are making their public debut: most have never been exhibited before. Among them, to the left of the entrance, is Wojciech Gerson’s 1862 Rest in a Tatra Mountain Hut. To the right is Stag Cornered by Wolves by Carl Borromäus Ruthart, a distinguished Gdańsk-born animal painter active in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Now take a closer look at the suite’s original furnishings. The beautiful blue, gourd-shaped vase on the desk is the work of Tasios Kiriazopoulos. A Greek-born artist and refugee from the Greek Civil War, he trained and worked in Wrocław. We identified this now highly valuable piece on a windowsill in the room housing the Castle Archive’s photographic collection. The sofas, custom-made at a furniture workshop on Lwowska Street, had for years furnished the offices of the Technical Department. Following the original design, we have placed beneath them a carpet made by Dywilan, a Łódź-based company still in business today. It was found in a utility storeroom beneath the courtyard of the Palace Under the Tin Roof.

As you continue towards the corridor, look closely at the finish of the doors and their frames. For several decades, these doors were concealed behind a plasterboard partition. Behind it, both the original paintwork and the key — complete with its original numbered tag from around 1980 — survived.

The two smaller rooms you are now entering were designed in a more modern style. From the wood-panelled dressing room, a side door leads into a black-and-white bathroom. Its walls are clad in large, custom-cut slabs of white Carrara marble from Italy and black Dębnik marble from Poland. Look up at the ceiling light, made by the Warsaw lighting manufacturer Polam-Meos. French sanitary ware, a large illuminated mirror and soft white towels heighten the sense of luxury. You might well envy the suite’s would-be occupants their bathtub, with its view of the Castle courtyard.

The walnut-panelled dressing room was originally intended to be lined with mirrors. The designers planned to place a mirror on each of the four wardrobe doors. The scheme was ultimately abandoned, probably for technical reasons. Among the surviving notes, we also found a sketch design for a luggage rack — a folding stand for a suitcase. High-quality hotel furniture was not available in Poland at the time, so it had to be commissioned from one of Warsaw’s craft workshops.

The painting by Józef Pankiewicz, remarkable for its intense colours, had previously decorated the office once occupied by the head of the Exhibition Organisation Department. As an exception, we decided to return it to its former place, although we do not know whether the designers intended to hang any paintings in this room.

As you leave, notice the two works hanging in the short corridor. These gouaches, created in 1967 by the eminent American artist Alexander Calder, come from the collection of the Ciechanowiecki Foundation, which collaborates with the Castle. The mirror standing between them, meanwhile, is one of the few pieces of furniture purchased for the guest suites. For many years, it stood in the offices of the Royal Castle Department of Arts.

The husband-and-wife design team Jan Maass and Maria Referowska proposed a rather innovative solution for the bedroom. A wardrobe and a dressing table were to be placed on opposite sides of the bed, concealed behind curtains. Combined with the wall covering and a curtain made from the same striped silk, they create a striking, fully coordinated interior—a complete “total look”.

As in the Drawing Room, we have used objects purchased in 1979 and later rediscovered elsewhere in the Castle. These include another carpet from the Dywilan factory, a marble-topped dressing table with matching cabinets, and the bedside cabinets made at the furniture works in Henryków.

You also have a rare opportunity to see a watercolour by Julian Fałat, dating from around 1912 and depicting geese in flight. On the wall opposite the bed, we have hung Jan Styka’s painted study Hermes Leading the Souls. The decoration is completed by Witold Turkiewicz’s multicoloured glass works, distinguished by the artist’s distinctive technique and finish. Among them is a vase purchased for the suite, which we found in one of the Education Department’s rooms.

You are now entering a section of the exhibition that we have left exactly as it was. Filled with scholarly books, the offices of the Royal Castle Department of Arts staff form a mirror image of the guest rooms facing the courtyard. This area was originally intended as a bedroom for a female guest, with an adjoining dressing room and bathroom.

After the communist authorities abandoned plans for the guest wing, the space was taken over by museum staff. Paradoxically, the needs of a modern museum had been overlooked during the Castle’s reconstruction: not enough space was provided for offices, storage or even ticket desks. The completed interiors were therefore put to new uses, obscuring their original character. Yet traces of it can still be sensed almost instinctively—for example in the desk squeezed into the cramped confines of the former dressing room.

You are in the office of Dr Anna Szkurłat, the Castle’s curator of glass and porcelain. On the table, you can see works by Witold Turkiewicz, one of the most original Polish glass artists of the communist era. His works were intended to decorate the Castle’s suites. He developed his own method of embellishing the surface of glass, creating unique sculptural effects.

Work on The Secret Chambers turned out to involve more detective work than we had expected. We unearthed forgotten documents and drawings, following the trail of negotiations between representatives of the authorities, museum staff and architects.

In search of objects purchased for these interiors, we combed through every room and storeroom in the Castle. To recreate the designers’ vision from fifty years ago, we borrowed from our colleagues the lamps, sofas and side tables that usually furnish their offices.

For a moment, you can put yourself in our shoes and look through the papers laid out on the desk. Take a look at our notes and working materials. You can also examine the original bolts of fabric standing in the corner, purchased for the interior decoration of the Castle’s suites.