Staszic Palace, Warsaw

Staszic Palace in Warsaw, Poland, is a mature neoclassical building erected in 1820–1823 through Polish initiative for a learned society, and it occupies a site with earlier sacred and civic uses. The location first hosted a small Eastern Orthodox chapel established in 1620 by the Polish king as a burial place for the former Russian tsar Vasili IV and his brother Dmitry Shuisky. In 1668 the chapel was handed to the Dominican Order, which administered it until 1808.

The present palace was raised in the early decades of the nineteenth century to house the Royal Society of Friends of Sciences and was named for its patron. Shortly after the new building opened, on 11 May 1830 a public unveiling placed a monument to Nicolaus Copernicus before its façade. The Society was suppressed after the November 1830 Uprising and the building passed into government hands, accommodating the Lottery Directorate until 1862 and, between 1857 and 1862, an Academy of Medical Science, which was later closed after the January 1863–64 Uprising.

In the late nineteenth century the palace’s functions changed under Russian influence. It contained a boys’ gymnasium with boarding for Orthodox pupils and, from about 1890, an Orthodox church. The exterior was remodeled in 1892–1893 in a Russian-Byzantine manner and the work was followed by an imperial visit on 22 August 1897. In October 1897 construction began on a bell tower fitted with ten bells.

During World War I, after German forces occupied Warsaw in 1915, the building served as a German soldiers’ club. Following Poland’s restoration of independence in 1918 it became the seat of the Warsaw Scientific Society and hosted several scientific and cultural institutes, including a temporary home for the State Geological Institute in 1919. Work undertaken in 1924–1926 restored the exterior toward a classical appearance, though the earlier nineteenth-century composition was not fully reconstructed.

The palace suffered damage in Luftwaffe air raids in September 1939 and was garrisoned and defended during the Warsaw Uprising, being occupied on 9 August 1944 and held until the fall of the Powiśle quarter. The building was almost completely destroyed in 1944, with wartime losses assessed at about sixty percent. Reconstruction took place between 1946/1947 and 1950; the structure was enlarged toward the south, given a new façade facing an extended street, and the dome’s form was altered. After rebuilding the palace returned to the Warsaw Scientific Society and later became the headquarters of the Polish Academy of Sciences, which it continues to house.