Pakoszów Palace, Piechowice

The Palace in Pakoszów in Piechowice, Poland, is a Baroque country house rebuilt in 1725 for Johann Martin Gottfried and developed by local noble owners. Erected in the Baroque period, the building played both a residential and an industrial role in the 18th and 19th centuries and hosted notable visitors, which secured its place in regional history.

The house began as a country estate of the Counts Schaffgotsch and was rebuilt in 1725 as a Baroque residence for Johann Martin Gottfried (1685–1737), who later served as mayor and churchwarden of Hirschberg, now known as Jelenia Góra. Ownership then passed to Georg Friedrich Smith (1703–1757). In 1771 the property entered the Hess family through marriage, beginning a long period of family ownership that lasted until 1945.

During the late 18th century the palace combined domestic life with a linen-bleaching business. Textiles were worked in tubs on the ground floor, rinsed with water taken from the nearby Zacken stream, and spread on adjacent meadows to bleach. The right to use this water was confirmed by King Frederick II in a charter of 1777. The Prussian king visited the house several times in the mid- and late 18th century. While under Hess stewardship the house received a number of intellectual and artistic visitors, including the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the painter Sebastian C. C. Reinhardt, the astronomer Johann J. C. Bode, Jonae, and the future American president John Quincy Adams.

After the death of Heinrich Hess (1745–1802) the estate passed to his cousin and adoptive son Johann Daniel Hess (1764–1854). In the 19th century Daniel Hermann Hess (1815–1884) used the palace primarily as a summer residence. The linen-bleaching operation continued until 1856. Members of the family remained at the house into the 20th century; the last family residents included Margarethe Drewes, née Hess (1872–1939), and her husband Hans Drewes.

In 1945, following the transfer of almost all of Silesia to Poland after the Second World War, the family was expropriated and the property passed to the Polish state. The building served a range of institutional uses and at one point functioned as a children’s home, before later standing empty. The palace was entered on the national monument register on 1 September 1959, recorded under number 630/619.

A descendant of the former owners, Hagen Hartmann (born 1941), repurchased the estate in 2005. Between 2008 and 2012 an architectural conversion, restoration and extension adapted the complex for a new use as a hospitality and cultural venue. The restored complex was inaugurated on 1 April 2012. The ballroom’s illusionistic allegorical ceiling was reconstructed and painted anew by a Dresden artist; the original decorative ceiling had been by the Glatz Baroque painter Johann Franz Hoffmann but had not survived. The grounds and the palace’s historically important rooms are now maintained for public access and for contemporary use.