Wesslow Palace

Wesslow Palace in Warsaw, Poland, is a late Baroque magnate residence erected between 1746 and 1752. Built in the mid-eighteenth century, the house became a notable address along the Royal Route and later played a sustained role in the city’s postal and administrative life. Its changing ownership and functions across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries linked the building to both civic communication and public administration.

The palace first appears in a city plan of 1762. Early recorded owners included General Franciszek Jan Załuski, who sold the property in 1761, and a sequence of private proprietors who held the house through the 1760s. By 1780 the building belonged to Ignacy Franciszek Przebendowski, who moved the royal post office into the premises. Because it maintained postal links with Saxony, the site became popularly known as the “Saxon Post”.

At the end of the eighteenth century the palace was described as royal private property and passed by inheritance to Józef Antoni Poniatowski. In 1805 a later owner sold the building to the Berlin General Post Office, and between that sale and 1874 the premises served as postal offices and postal stables. On 2 November 1830 Frédéric Chopin stopped at the post office here to check his luggage and say farewell to his family before leaving Warsaw for good.

City works in the early 1880s changed the palace’s street-facing form. During rebuilding in 1882–1884 the structure was altered to suit a widened road and a removed neighbouring tenement. After these changes the property accommodated newspaper editorial rooms from 1887 and housed commercial tenants such as a tailor and a cabinet of wax figures. In the years between the world wars the building hosted antiquarian activities associated with a “Palace of Art” use.

The palace burned in 1944, an event that left only outer walls and some fittings standing. Reconstruction took place in 1947–1948, returning the exterior to the appearance it had adopted after the 1882–1884 alterations. After the postwar rebuilding the premises were used by provincial and then national prosecutor’s offices. Today the building contains the General Prosecutor’s Office and the Institute of Justice.