Radoliński Palace, Jarocin

The palace is a three-storey, mid-19th-century house executed in the English neo-Gothic manner, set within what was once a private English-style park. The exterior presents a principal façade facing the park and a rear façade turned toward the town, linked to a formal garden and an extensive terrace. A projecting risalit (a projecting section of a façade) marks the main entrance and is finished with crenellation (a battlemented top), and the Leszczyc coat of arms is displayed on the façade.

Internally the layout combined family apartments, guest rooms, and large public rooms. At completion the plan included numerous bedrooms, a library, a boudoir, halls and a salon, an orangery that housed some 600 potted plants, a great hall, bathrooms, kitchens, servants’ rooms, a wardrobe, study, dining room, and a terrace. Many principal finishes were wooden floors and the main hall contained tall, narrow stained-glass windows. Furnishings recorded at the site included marble-topped tables and carved fireplace surrounds, and several movable objects such as a mahogany piano, an ancient vase from Pompeii, and Italian damask curtains.

The palace held extensive collections. By the late nineteenth century the library numbered about ten thousand volumes, including a 1563 Brest Bible and a manuscript of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. A numismatic collection contained coins and medals from antiquity and later periods, for example a 1623 medal bearing the portrait of King Sigismund III Vasa. The arms collection comprised swords and firearms by named makers. A Renaissance wardrobe stored 137 pieces of Chinese porcelain. In the main hall glazed display cabinets exhibited the family’s arms collection, described as the largest such collection in the region.

Several later additions and fittings survive in record. An orangery was converted to a library in 1907–1908, running water was introduced in 1906 and gas lighting in 1908, a gardener’s house was built in 1898 near the main entrance, and a sundial by Richard Munzky was placed on the rear elevation in 1910. Around 1911–1914 an east wing was added and other outbuildings were constructed in the park. Decorative fittings included historic wooden panelling brought from an Austrian monastery installed in the dining room, a marble fireplace presented by Sultan Abdul Hamid II with bronze wolf figures once owned by Stanisław August Poniatowski, a fireplace in the wardrobe bearing the Sforza arms, a sixteenth-century marble lavabo, and a silver crucifix given by Pope Pius IX.

The 1917 fire destroyed a substantial portion of the library, furniture, works of art, and weapons; rebuilding took place, but interiors never regained their prior splendour. In the years after 1945 the building suffered vandalism and theft. The park laid out with input from the landscape designer Peter Joseph Lenné and Władysław Radoliński no longer exists in its original form, and the palace stands in a condition that calls for restoration.