History
Residential buildings in Toruń began in 1236, following the city’s relocation from its original place in the village of Stary Toruń to a site on a raised terrace less vulnerable to Vistula flooding. The earliest houses in Toruń were wooden or half-timbered. The first brick Gothic townhouses began to be built in Toruń Old Town in the second half of the 13th century, and by the 14th century, brick buildings were common. As the city’s merchant wealth grew and trade and transport expanded in Toruń, granaries were also built. By the 13th and 14th centuries, there were around thirty of them in the Old Town, later surpassing a hundred during the peak of the grain trade.
By the end of the 14th century, both Toruń towns and their suburbs reached their demographic peak, and consequently, the greatest extent of medieval residential and commercial development. The economic crisis of the 15th century, exacerbated by the destruction caused by the Teutonic Order’s wars with Poland and Lithuania, led to a decline in population and building activity. This trend may have persisted until the mid-16th century. Only the revival of grain exports and the growing importance of fairs contributed to another, short-lived demographic boom for Toruń in the early 17th century. However, this period of prosperity was relatively short-lived, ended with the Polish-Swedish wars, which were accompanied by plague epidemics, unfavorable climate change, and a collapse in the grain trade. Therefore, Renaissance and early Baroque changes in Toruń’s residential architecture were not significant, likely limited to the houses of leading patrician families in the Old Town.
In the following centuries, medieval granaries and houses were transformed, which included the change of the function of higher storeys into storehouses, the change of façade decorations, or new furnishings and arrangement of rooms. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought the greatest annihilation of the Toruń Gothic houses. The siege of Toruń by the Swedish Swedish army in 1703 and the Napoleonic wars caused devastation and the collapse of urban development. Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a devastating process of rebuilding many old buildings or building new houses in their place, which was stoppped only in the 20th century after the conservation of monuments has been initiated.
Architecture
Old Town of Toruń acquired a rather irregular spatial layout, resulting from several stages of expansion. The most symmetrical building blocks were in the southern part of the city, while the remaining blocks were adapted to natural conditions and existing structures before the city’s expansion, such as the Franciscan friary. The spatial foundation of New Town of Toruń was determined by the established boundaries of the Old Town, the castle, its outer bailey, and the Dominican friary, founded somewhat earlier. Plots were added to the regularly planned streets and building blocks, whose layout clearly deviated from this regularity. In total, there were twenty-three building blocks in the Old Town, and nineteen in the New Town. The Old Town was considerably more densely developed, with smaller houses without utility facilities predominating. Wide plots with warehouses at the rear, appropriate for merchants, also played a more prominent role. A characteristic feature of the New Town development was the large number of empty squares used for tanning (near the Struga Toruńska) and for setting up cloth frames (in the northeastern part of the city).
The oldest houses in Toruń, built during a period of rapid urban expansion and a massive influx of population, were constructed of wood or in timber-framing technique, sometimes resting on stone foundations made of rounded granite boulders. At the ground-floor level, these early dwellings consisted of either a single, roughly square-shaped room or a room preceded by a corridor. Later, these structures persisted in the form of houses lacking courtyards, typically situated along the defensive walls. The interiors of these earliest Toruń homes lacked permanent partitions, though they were sometimes divided by lightweight wooden screens (an exception being the oldest section of the townhouse at 13 Żeglarska Street, which featured a separate, smaller rear area containing a well). From these primitive dwellings, multi-story, two-bay townhouses eventually evolved, in which large entrance halls continued to serve the multifunctional purpose of the original, single-space interiors.
Among Toruń Gothic houses from 14th-15th centuries, there were two main types: merchant tenement houses, usually larger and more impressive, and much more modest and narrower craftsmen’s houses. New Town of Toruń, due to its craftsmanship, had a significantly smaller number of richly decorated tenement houses and granaries than the Old Town. Compared to those in the Old Town, medieval tenement houses in the New Town were much more modest, usually single-story, narrow-plan, with two- or three-axis facades. Among the Old Town tenement houses, medium-sized buildings had three-axis facades, and four- or five-axis tenement houses were not uncommon. Moreover, as early as the 14th century, the original houses in the Old Town were expanded by a new rear bays. Brick was used as the building material, but even masonry buildings could have a part of their structure constructed using the half-timbered technique (e.g., upper floors, rear facades and partition walls). The New Town likely had a larger number of half-timbered houses, and they featured longer in the city’s architecture than in the Old Town.
The facades of Gothic townhouses in Toruń were usually gabled, so the most impressive parts of the buildings faced the streets and squares. Less frequently, facades facing the street were situated parallel to the ridge. Facades were constructed in highly decorative forms, embellished with moulded recesses, shafts, blendes and friezes. These elements were filled with painted ornamentation featuring typical Gothic motifs of pointed arches, trefoils, bladders and tracery. The colors of building facades most often oscillated around red, white, black, and glazed bricks, green or red. If the brick facade was colored, it was done so also at the joints. Stepped forms were very popular among gables, topped with decorative battlements at each step. Window openings were lancet or quadrangular. They were often placed on the axes of tall panels, singly or several windows high. Blends, recesses, and panels had lancet or segmental arches, and from the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, with the emergence of the so-called soft style in the architecture of the Teutonic Knights state, semicircular blendes were also introduced. Windows in wealthier townhouses were glazed, wooden shutters were used too. Entrance portals in Old Town townhouses were impressive, tall, and moulded, sometimes with flat tympanums above the rectangular passages.
The interiors of tenement houses were divided by wooden beam ceilings, usually into three or four main stories, plus attics located under the roof trusses. The lowest stories of medieval tenement houses were not typical cellars (they became such only over the centuries, after the ground level was raised), but were instead half-basements, with level only about half a meter lower than the street level. Many cellars or basements were inhabited, while others served primarily as cool storage rooms, beer halls, or wine taverns. Access to these spaces was via cellar necks and stoops or ground-floor terraces preceding the building’s entrances, located in front of the building. The ground floors, ranging from 3 to 6 meters high, housed utility rooms (kitchens and halls), while the upper floors served residential purposes. The upper floors, usually 2 meters high, were used as warehouses and granaries.
A characteristic feature of medieval townhouses in Toruń was the so-called high or great hall. Located in the front section of the ground floor, these halls spanned the height of two stories. As the most spacious area in the entire building, they housed a hearth where meals were prepared. In halls that occupied the full depth of the ground floor, the hearth was typically situated halfway along one of the side walls, or less frequently, against the rear wall. In houses with a two-bay layout, the hearth was placed in a corner of the hall, against the wall separating the front and rear sections. In the earliest halls, these hearths resembled large fireplaces. By the 14th century, large masonry hoods began to be constructed above them to channel smoke out through the roof. These hoods, which could measure up to 3 meters wide at the base, were either suspended from a ceiling beam or supported by a post. They tapered gradually toward the top, reaching a diameter of approximately 0.4–0.6 meters, and were positioned at a height that allowed people to move about freely underneath. In addition to cooking, these halls also served as spaces for conducting trade and carrying out craftwork. In the 15th century, it became common to add overhanging galleries within these high halls, providing connections between different levels.
Toward the end of the 14th century, Toruń townhouses began to feature additional side rooms (also spanning two stories in height), situated between the building’s front wall and the kitchen, or between the front wall and the staircase. In the first case, the rear wall of the room also served as the side wall of the kitchen or, more accurately, a kitchen alcove within the high hall, as there was not yet a separate, independent kitchen room. The walls separating the side rooms of the front section from the hall were constructed of timber or were half-timber. In exceptional instances, they were built of bricks and covered with a barrel vault (e.g. at 16 Łazienna Street) or a cross-rib vault supported by a central pillar (e.g. at 2 Szczytna Street). The purpose of these side chambers in the front sections could vary, though they were likely associated with trade, craftsmanship, or general commercial activity.
In the rear section of the ground floor, there was either a single chamber or, in some townhouses, two chambers that served representative functions (for hosting distinguished guests or concluding business transactions). These rooms were lower than the high halls and featured timber-beamed ceilings, typically plain, though occasionally moulded, which were either left bare or painted. In many townhouses, the floors of these chambers contained vents connected to hypocaustum heating systems located in the cellars. Consequently, these rooms were heated by hot air, which entered the space through floor openings that could be opened or closed with specially designed covers, depending on the need for warmth. Sometimes, fireplaces were installed in the rear rooms, with their chimneys integrated into the thickness of the walls. For this reason, they were very rarely placed against the internal partition walls, being located instead along the rear or side walls. Furthermore, these rear chambers were richly decorated with wall and ceiling paintings, which enhanced their formal, prestigious character. The rooms on the first floor within the rear section held a similar status and were likely used as dining rooms.
In the walls inside many medieval tenement houses there were various types of recesses. They varied in size, ranging from small ones 0.3 meters wide to large ones that spanned the entire width of a wall. The most common, however, were niches approximately 0.6 meters wide, 0.8 meters high, and—most frequently 0.4 meters deep. Some had decorative forms, others smaller served as recess cabinets closed with timber doors, yet others had lighting or very often washbasins with an outflow to the outside. Vessels with water were hung on metal hooks in the vault of the washbasin recesses. In tenement houses in Toruń there were also wells, located in the basements of houses. Initially, they were built in the back courtyards, but during the subsequent medieval transformations of the tenement house or the construction of a new larger ones, they were incorporated into the area of houses.
Medieval tenement houses combined the functions of a residential house, everyday workplace and a granary. The storage rooms were located on the upper floors of the buildings, which was a characteristic feature of the northern European type of tenement houses. However, in medieval Toruń numerous buildings were also built entirely for granaries. Most of them were located in the southern part of the Old Town on the Vistula, where goods from ships were handled, although they did not form a separate district, as in Gdańsk’s Granary Island, nor did interfere with the city fortifications, as in Grudziądz.
Granaries, like residential houses, had ridge forms, with gables located in the facades, which were decorated no less magnificently than in residential houses, using for this purpose rich blending and friezes. The zone decorated with blendes was distinguished in the facades by separating it with a cornice from the ground floor zone. Entrance portals, and not infrequently windows, were moulded, imposing, stepped gables were also erected, which distinguished Toruń granaries from Grudziądz granaries, treated only utilitarian (this could have been influenced by their location on a slope outside the town, while all Toruń granaries were located within the perimeter of the walls). The difference between a residential house in Toruń and a granary was visible mainly in the sizes and shape of the windows. The granary windows of the ground floor were topped with segmental arches, sometimes they were four-sided, but practically never pointed.
The interiors of the granaries were divided similarly with timber ceilings, but without unnecessary divisions into rooms, instead of which there was a large warehouse space. For this reason, in large buildings, not only sockets in the walls had to be used to support the ceiling beams, but also timber piers placed in the middle of floor. In order to transport grain and other goods, techniques known from coastal or situated on flat terrain granaries were used, where gear pulley similar to cranes were used. Inside, there could be elevators with ropes that passed through openings in the ceilings. Sacks of grain were also carried by hand up wooden staircases, which were positioned one above the other. At times, these flights of stairs could be lifted and propped against the opposite edge of the opening. This created a gap in the floor, which was then used for hoisting goods with the help of ropes.
Current state
In Toruń has preserved most of the medieval patrician houses and granaries in the territory of the Hanseatic League. Despite numerous damages and destructive transformations in the nineteenth century, many original and distinctive elements of the interior, ornaments and details, especially the Gothic façades of buildings, have survived. At present about 300 townhouses have a readable medieval layout and more or less visible elements of Gothic architecture. Many of the former granaries have survived to our times.
The best preserved buildings include: the tenement house at Holy Spirit 12 street, Copernicus 15 and 38 street, Łazienna 16 and 22, Mostowa 6, Piekary 4 and 9, Rabiańska 8 and 22A, Rynek Staromiejski 9, 17 and 20, Szczytna 2-4, Szeroka 38, Wielkie Garbary 7, Virgin Mary 2, Franciszkańska 12, Żeglarska 5, 7, 9, 10 and 13 streets and the house at Królowa Jadwiga 9 street, which despite the rebuilt façade has numerous Gothic polychromes inside. Townhouse at Copernicus street is also famous for being the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus astronomer. Today it houses a museum devoted to him. One of the oldest granaries is the Gothic building at Podmurna 1 street, in addition, the granary can be seen at Rabiańska 19 and 21, Łazienna 3, and at Franciszkańska 4 and 6 street. At Podmurna 4/6 there is a Gothic St. George’s Court, built on the old town zwinger, near the fortified tower.
show Gothic house of Copernicus on map
show Court of St George on map
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