Warmątowice Sienkiewiczowskie Palace

The palace in Warmątowice Sienkiewiczowskie, near Legnica, Poland, is a manor house erected by local Silesian noble families in the early 1600s in a Renaissance manner and later reshaped in the Baroque period; its long ownership history and use in warfare and cultural protection have made it a notable local landmark. The village itself appears in records from 1217, and a fortified dwelling stood on the site from at least the fifteenth century before the manor was rebuilt in the early seventeenth century.

In 1602 Wenzel von Zedlitz acquired the estate and replaced the medieval fortified house with a Renaissance manor set within broad defensive moats, an inscribed stone from that building phase survives from this time. Over the following century the property changed hands several times, passing among families described as von Eichholz, von Tunckel, the von Zedlitz line, Johannes Sieghofer von Siegenberg in 1639, and the Zahradek family, before being sold in 1736 to Carl Ferdinand von Seherr-Thoss.

Between 1748 and 1762 Carl Ferdinand von Seherr-Thoss carried out a Baroque remodelling that focused largely on interior arrangements while making selective changes to the outside, such as a new entrance portal and a triangular gable. Ownership continued to shift in the late eighteenth century, with Gotthard Oswald von Tschammer taking the estate in 1782, Count Carl von Roedern in 1790, and subsequently Hartwig Ludwig Anton von Hoym after 1795. In 1811 the manor was given to Fanny Biron von Curland and a year later sold to Lieutenant Louis Seraphim von Olszewski; his family retained the property for more than a century.

On 26 August 1813 the palace served as the headquarters of Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher during the Wars of Liberation, before the Silesian army under his command won the Battle of the Katzbach. An obelisk engraved to commemorate Blücher’s presence stands in front of the manor. In the closing stages of World War II the provincial conservator Günther Grundmann used the building from 1944 to shelter art described as threatened by bombing, and the numismatic collection of the Wrocław city museum was stored there; the collection has since been lost. When Russian troops entered the area in spring 1945 the complex was looted and heavily damaged and the owning family escaped to the west.

After 1945 the manor was inhabited by people resettled from territories east of the new Polish border. During the 1960s parts of the complex were used by a state-run farm, then fell into disuse and decay. Proposals in the 1970s to establish a memorial to the writer Henryk Sienkiewicz with hospitality facilities did not come to fruition. In 1995 the Rabkowski family bought the ensemble and carried out extensive restoration work, converting former guest rooms into a small hotel and adapting a former cowshed as a banquet hall while using the palace as their residence. The group of buildings and grounds is protected as a cultural monument, with the main house entered on the register in July 1960, the garden pavilion recorded in September 1961, and the park added in September 1976.