The Looting & Recovery of the Wawel Castle Tapestries

wawel-pap_19610116_00B.jpg, large, Unloading crates containing part of the so-called National Treasure. The MS Krynica entered the port of Gdynia carrying exhibits from the Wawel Royal

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You might think that tapestries are not typically the stuff of spy thrillers. The Wawel Castle’s collection – looted, pawned, cut into pieces, and once smuggled across the Atlantic on a ship also carrying British Crown gold – begs to differ.

1571–1795: Prologue

One year before his death, King Sigismund Augustus wrote in his will that he would bequeath his tapestries to his three sisters for use during their lifetimes and, upon their deaths, to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It seemed this unique collection was safely secured. However, it was not long before the first attempts were made to seize, trade and plunder it.

During the era of the Vasa dynasty, the will of the last Jagiellonian king was contested, and the subsequent rulers bequeathed the tapestries to their descendants as private property. In 1669, following the abdication of Jan Kazimierz, the collection was given as collateral to Franciszek Gratta – a banker and Gdańsk’s postmaster. It was not bought back by the state treasury until over half a century later.

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Tapestries at the opening of the exhibition ‘All the King’s Tapestries: Homecomings 2021–1961–1921’ at Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków, Kraków, 2021, photo: Łukasz Gągulski

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After being transported to Warsaw in 1764, the tapestries were used to decorate the interiors of the Royal Castle for the coronation of Stanisław August Poniatowski. They remained in the castle in Warsaw for four years. During this time, some of the tapestries were damaged, and sections of them were even cut out. The state of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at that time, which was on the brink of collapse, is tellingly illustrated by the fact that gold threads were pulled from the tapestries, which were then melted down to obtain precious metal. The result was dismal, not only for the tapestries themselves – the gold threads usually turned out to be only gilded silver. In all fairness, however, one must point out that such plundering was not exclusively a Polish practice – after the French revolution, tapestries from the royal collections in France were destroyed in this manner on a massive scale.

From the castle, the tapestries – in varying conditions – were taken to the Palace of the Commonwealth in Warsaw (now the Krasiński Palace), where the national archives were kept at the time. The tapestries narrowly escaped destruction when the palace burned down in 1782. Fortunately, they had been taken to the Carmelite monastery on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street shortly beforehand. They were brought back to the rebuilt palace in 1785. However, they remained there for only a decade, still unpacked. Following the final partition treaty, Russian troops diligently carried out the orders personally issued by Catherine the Great, containing precise instructions on what was to be plundered.

1795–1876: Lord knows where they have gone

The tapestries collected by Sigismund Augustus were plundered not only physically but also symbolically – the invaders carefully concealed their origin, and nearly all knowledge of them was lost. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz revived this knowledge in his work Zbiór Pamiętników Historycznych o Dawnej Polszcze (A Collection of Historical Chronicles about Old Poland), published in 1822. In it, he quotes a description of the tapestries from a panegyric composed by Stanisław Orzechowski on the occasion of the marriage of Sigismund Augustus to Catherine of Austria. About the tapestries and other royal treasures, Niemcewicz wrote:

Lord knows where they have gone. The last ones, which I saw with my own eyes during the reign of King Stanisław August […], were taken and transported out of the country in 1764.

Niemcewicz’s information is extremely vague, as is that of Sebastiano Campi, a classical philologist from the University of Pisa, who, after visiting Poland on two occasions, published a text in 1831 that also mentioned the tapestries. At that time, the main challenge was simply to prove that the Polish king had indeed possessed such a rich collection. The available knowledge on the subject was so scarce that Campi’s theories were far off the mark – he claimed that the tapestries had been made based on designs by Raphael and had become part of a collection in Dresden, assuming they had been taken there from Kraków during the Saxon period.

Ambroży Grabowski, a collector of Polish antiquities, continued the archival research. In 1845, he wrote:

Where these tapestries might now be found, it is not known: I have met with certain traces of them in manuscripts, but I am uncertain whether they be the same; perhaps hereafter someone will make known what has become of them, or where they might now be preserved.

Gradually, however, the first clear indications began to emerge. In 1853, Edward Rastawiecki discovered an inventory of tapestries dating from 1764, compiled during the coronation of King Stanisław August. A breakthrough came over 20 years later in 1876, thanks to Lucjan Siemieński, who wrote about 14 tapestries being stored in the Tsar’s palace in Gatchina, near Saint Petersburg.

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Trunks containing tapestries and other national treasures, temporarily deposited at the National Museum in Warsaw, 17 January 1961, photo: Janusz Uklejewski.

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In 1890, Alfred Römer presented a photograph of one of them, taken in Gatchina, to the Kraków Academy of Learning. In the following years, Marian Sokołowski and Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz, together with members of the Society for the Preservation of Historical Monuments founded in 1906, made pilgrimages to the palace in Gatchina. This laid the groundwork for the reclamation of the tapestries following Poland’s regaining of independence. One of the most important contributions was made by the historian Aleksander Czołowski, the founder of the Historical Museum of the City of Lviv, who, for several months between the overthrow of the tsarist regime and the October Revolution, worked with the committee responsible for preparing the reclamation and cataloguing the tapestries.

1921–1928: Hidden in plain sight

Following the signing of the Treaty of Riga, a process began of recovering not only the memory of the tapestries, but also the objects themselves. But treaties are treaties, and Russia is Russia. Upon their arrival in Moscow, the Polish delegates to the committee responsible for the reclamation initially slept in railway carriages at the cargo station. The negotiations proceeded slowly and in a hostile atmosphere. In the first few months, 19 tapestries were indeed recovered, but then the matter came to a standstill. The Soviet side declared that all the remaining ones… had gone missing during the evacuation from Saint Petersburg prior to the advance of the Prussian army, and that the search for them could take years. To paraphrase a famous line from the 1981 classic comedy Teddy Bear – we don’t have your tapestries, so what do you intend to do about it?

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Tapestries looted by Russia after the Third Partition of Poland returned from the USSR to Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków in the 1920s, photo: CAF / PAP

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Following a diplomatic intervention, however, the lost tapestries were found – in the storerooms of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, where they had not only been taken after the evacuation but had even been photographed. Clearly, they had been hidden in plain sight. The Poles sought to recover additional sets of tapestries, both large and small, from the dispersed collection – by the autumn of 1922, they had managed to secure 91 out of 157 (there may have been even more during the reign of Sigismund Augustus). The following year, just one – but a particularly valuable – tapestry arrived: The Construction of the Tower of Babel from the biblical cycle, one of the largest tapestries in the entire collection. It was lugged single-handedly by one of the Polish delegates, who transported the package from Moscow to Warsaw by train in a sleeper carriage. In the following years, additional small batches were arduously retrieved from the USSR. Finally, the last arrived in the spring of 1928. A total of 136 tapestries were successfully recovered.

Regaining the tapestries has only been half the battle. There was still the matter of conservation. In light of the massive destruction that took place in Russia in the 19th century, the earlier plundering of gold thread seems like a harmless bit of courtly mischief. Some of the tapestries stored in Gatchina were cut up and used as upholstery for the palace furniture. Others had… holes cut out of them for stove ventilation. The restoration is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The fabrics themselves had also become home to some unwelcome guests – Bronisława Łukaszewiczowa, head of conservation at Wawel Castle, notes that around 1,100 moth caterpillars were found in them.

1938–1939: Does this mean war?

Following their triumphant return to Wawel, some of the tapestries once again served a ceremonial purpose – they adorned the restored chambers and provided a backdrop for events ranging from President Mościcki’s state banquets to Marshal Piłsudski’s funeral. They were protected as carefully as possible – hydrometers and thermometers were installed in the rooms, the tapestries were hung at a slight distance from the walls to ensure air circulation, and watch was kept at night by a policeman in addition to the regular guard. Soon, however, it would become necessary to start thinking about security of a different kind.

When the Anschluss of Austria took place in 1938, and as tensions between Warsaw and Berlin escalated and the Reich’s expansionist plans became increasingly clear, the Polish Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education began to make serious preparations to safeguard the country’s historical monuments in the event of war. To prepare for the possibility of a chemical attack, museums had to be modernised in a very specific way: they needed to have sealed-off rooms for staff and to be equipped with gas masks and decontamination supplies. To facilitate a potential evacuation, historical treasures had to be selected – the most valuable ones would be saved first.

A document containing the guidelines highlights Polish historical artefacts as being of particular importance, since ‘their loss would be disproportionately greater for the state than that of foreign objects’. Citizens must regard their preservation as a duty, ‘even at the cost of the greatest sacrifice and exposure to danger’. There are specifications concerning how to pack the evacuated museum artefacts (into wooden crates of the smallest possible size to facilitate transport, filled with scrap paper rather than straw) as well as how to describe them (with at least three copies: for the institution from which they originate, for the ministry, and to be packed with the items).

In the spring of 1939, the ministry was already demanding that museums urgently submit lists of their most valuable items. In a subsequent document setting out guidelines, the artefacts to be placed under special protection were divided into two categories – those requiring evacuation and those that needed to be securely stored on site.

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Official visit to Poland by a delegation from the Republic of Ghana, led by Ghana’s president and prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah. Visit to Wawel Royal Castle. Pictured, among others: Kwame Nkrumah (R) in the Envoys’ Hall, Wawel Royal Castle, 1961, photo: Stanisław Dąbrowiecki / PAP

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The partial evacuation of removable artefacts began in June 1939. In Kraków, at the end of August, the altarpiece in Saint Mary’s Church, designed by Veit Stoss, was dismantled and hidden, and the collections of the Czartoryski Museum were also removed. However, the evacuation of the most valuable objects from Wawel Castle, where every square centimetre bears witness to many kings, was a far more complex undertaking than in the case of most museums – even though the Wawel collections were not particularly extensive at the time. To properly secure the tapestry collection alone, over 20 galvanised crates measuring 110 x 70 x 50 cm were needed, as well as metal cases 35 cm in diameter and 185 cm long. As early as the autumn of 1938, the curator, Stanisław Świerz-Zaleski, had requested funds from the ministry to start packing the tapestries. The first ten were not ready until April 1939.

September 1939: The Ark

On Saturday, 2 September, the Kraków Army, commanded by General Antoni Szylling, begins its retreat. At Wawel Castle, the curator of the collections, Świerz-Zaleski, the administrative director Stanisław Taszkowski, and Józef Krzywda-Polkowski (who worked in Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz’s team as one of the draughtsmen involved in the castle’s reconstruction) decide to evacuate. Szyszko-Bohusz, the castle’s director and one of the leading architects and conservators of the interwar period, reluctantly agrees.

The packed crates are taken by tractor and trailer to a wharf on the Vistula River. The plan was to send them by train, but attacks on the transport infrastructure quickly ruled out that option. As Świerz-Zaleski noted: ‘Trains were no longer running; the only option left was transport by barge.’

The crates containing 136 tapestries are loaded onto a barge that is normally used to transport coal, and covered with carpets. On such an inconspicuous vessel, the transport will be safer than by land, though it is still hardly a comfortable journey. The barge sets sail on Sunday at 10pm and travels mainly at night, occasionally hiding in reeds along the riverbank to avoid detection by Luftwaffe pilots. Thus begins one of the most spectacular operations to rescue cultural heritage during World War II.

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Unloading crates containing part of the so-called National Treasure. The MS Krynica entered the port of Gdynia carrying exhibits from the Wawel Royal Castle museum collection, which had been evacuated to Canada following the outbreak of the Second World War, Gdynia, 1961, photo: Janusz Uklejewski.

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In this perilous situation, there is something poetic about the image of these tapestries – depicting, among other things, the biblical story of Noah and covered with images of exotic animals – being saved from destruction aboard a river vessel. The only difference is that there are more people here than in the biblical tale – instead of Noah’s family, we have the aforementioned trio from Wawel, as well as the castle caretakers and churchwardens with their families – a total of several dozen people.

At dawn, the barge reaches Niepołomice. During the night between Monday and Tuesday, it makes its way to Nowy Korczyn – from there, a tugboat pulls it for a while. Meanwhile, the crew tries to gauge the situation at the front, though it is difficult to assess the reliability of the scraps of information gathered along the way. As it turns out, the rescue of the tapestries began at the very last possible moment – on 6 September, German troops occupy Kraków. Sailing right through the middle of the front line, on the morning of Thursday, 7 September, the barge carrying the tapestries reaches Sandomierz. From there, the plan is to continue by rail towards Jarosław. However, the crew finds only bombed-out, deserted ruins.

‘The shipment of these items was expected to be a short journey, somewhere to the east, where everything could easily be stored safely,’ Bohdan Treter later recalls. There is no choice but to continue down the river to Kazimierz Dolny, through an increasingly eerie landscape, passing burnt villages, deserted towns and destroyed bridges. In Kazimierz nad Wisłą, the cargo is transferred onto a dozen or so peasant carts. Here, most of the travellers part ways. The organisers of the evacuation from Wawel keep watch over the tapestries, moving slowly along with the peasant convoy, and reloading the crates onto other carts twice more along the way.

At last, they manage to secure motorised transport – a truck and three city buses. The plan for the rest of the journey is being worked out as they go along, but it is already apparent that no hiding place in the country will be safe. The direction is therefore clear – to the nearest safe border, with Romania. On 17 September, when the convoy reaches the border crossing in Kuty, the crew becomes alarmed by a change in the behaviour of the officers stationed there, and by the incomprehensible orders that are being issued in hushed tones. News of the Soviet attack reaches them. The Wawel treasures cross the Polish-Romanian border at nearly the same time that the Polish government evacuates the country – during the night of 17–18 September.

September 1939 – May 1940: Unpleasant surprises

The journey to Bucharest takes 10 days; the vehicles break down from time to time, so they have to wait and organise alternative transport. Some of the crates are hidden in the Polish embassy, the rest in the garage of the British embassy. The most difficult stage of the evacuation is now over, but Romania does not seem to be a safe haven. The Wawel team therefore seeks a different one. They turn to the Vatican for help – to no avail. Pope Pius XII, later notorious for his silence during the war, preferring behind-the-scenes manoeuvring to taking a public stance, washes his hands of the matter: these are not ecclesiastical collections. Meanwhile, in Kraków on 29 October, Hans Frank renames Wawel Castle ‘Krakauer Burg’. In the arcaded courtyard, where selected tapestries have hung during state ceremonies, other fabrics are now displayed – banners with swastikas on them.

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NSDAP standard-bearers and soldiers in the courtyard of Wawel Royal Castle, 1942, photo: Marek Tempel / National Digital Archives NAC.

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After two months in Romania, the tapestries embark upon another voyage – this time not on a river barge, but aboard the ship Ardeal, bound for France. The journey lasts almost two months, including a long, enforced stopover in Malta, to which the ship has been diverted by the British naval authorities. On 8 January 1940, it arrives in Marseille. The German invasion of France is now only four months away.

Now that they have safely crossed the Polish border, the evacuation of the tapestries is proceeding in a far more organised manner than during the first few days, when decisions were made spontaneously on the basis of very limited pieces of information. At the French port, a representative of the Polish government is already waiting, after arranging another hiding place. This time, it’s a very appropriate one – the town of Aubusson has been one of the most important centres of tapestry production for centuries. The Wawel tapestries were made in workshops in Brussels, but for the first time in their long history, they are returning close to their source.

There are no longer bullets and grenades flying through the air, but conditions remain precarious. Unloading takes place in the midst of a downpour, and the three-day train journey is made during bitterly cold weather. Upon arrival in Aubusson, the crates – some of them badly damaged – are unpacked for the first time. For conservation reasons, the fabrics couldn’t be packed in airtight materials during the long journey and storage, as this would encourage the growth of fungi, mould and bacteria and cause the threads to disintegrate. During the Romanian-French section of the journey, the tapestries were therefore transported in unsealed crates. However, during the hasty packing at Wawel Castle – with only the imminent river transport of the crates in mind at that time – it was difficult to adhere to standard procedures. It was also impossible to avoid jolts and mechanical damage, and the time of year – autumn and winter – was not conducive to transport. After unpacking the tapestries, some of them turn out to be soaked and mouldy. Fortunately, most remained in good condition.

Conservation work on the damaged tapestries begins in Aubusson. It is interrupted by Germany’s invasion of France. Karol Estreicher, an art historian and secretary to Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski, who will play a key role after the war in reclaiming looted works of art, buys a truck to transport the tapestries out of Aubusson. The Polish team, together with staff from the French workshop, carefully pack the tapestries into over 70 new crates. The tapestries do not set off on their journey alone – other rescued Polish artefacts arrive from Paris, including the Szczerbiec sword and Chopin’s manuscripts. The third voyage begins, which turns out to be the longest of them all.

May–July 1940: Save it yourself

Once again – like in early September the previous year – the destination is uncertain. The landscape is slightly different, but the overall situation evokes an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. The Polish government is hastily fleeing abroad, and the Wawel treasures are being transported by whatever means available, as long as they can eventually reach a port. The safekeeping of the treasures is entrusted to 34-year-old Estreicher, who is given a free hand by Sikorski. In his memoir, he describes the following exchange:

Text

– General, please save the Wawel Treasury.”

– Save it yourself! I have to save the Government of the Republic.

Estreicher is accompanied by Świerz-Zaleski and Krzywda-Polskowski. On 18 June in Bordeaux, the truck drives – at full speed, ignoring all customs procedures – onto the deck of the ship Chorzów, which is about to sail to England. This route is not much safer than travelling down the Vistula on a barge. At sea, the Chorzów cannot be hidden in any reeds – the only consolation is that, if necessary, Luftwaffe fire can be returned with anti-aircraft machine guns. Tradition must be upheld – where are the crates containing the tapestries stored? As Estreicher notes: ‘in a small hold below deck, where coal is usually stowed’. It also becomes a cabin for the three Poles who are guarding the treasure… by sleeping on the crates. The Szczerbiec lies close by, outside the crates – in case it becomes necessary to abandon the sinking cargo and flee to the lifeboats.

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Transferring the tapestries brought from Canada from the MS Krynica, Gdynia, 1961, photo: Janusz Uklejewski.

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From the port in Falmouth, the cargo is transported by rail to London. At long last, it will be safe at the Polish embassy. Less than one month later, however, German bombs begin to fall on the English capital.

This time, however, the Poles are prepared. Shortly after their arrival, as the threat of an invasion of the British Isles becomes evident, a decision is made to carry out another – and final, as it turns out – evacuation across the Atlantic Ocean. Canada agrees to provide shelter for the treasures evacuated from Europe. Even deeper waters and an even larger ship – this time the Batory. But now the cargo is truly well protected, for it happens that the Batory is also carrying gold from the British Crown. The Wawel treasures are thus escorted by two ships belonging to the British Royal Navy.

On 12 July, the ship arrives at a port in Halifax. The tapestries are handed over to the Polish Consulate in Ottawa. At last, they can be safely unpacked. There is even talk of an exhibition, but Estreicher disagrees. As he writes, ‘The tapestries must be kept hidden away, not put on display for the public.’

1940–1961: ‘The tapestries have never been in such good hands’

Świerz-Zaleski and Krzywda-Polkowski continue to oversee the collection, which is finally being stored under appropriate conditions at the National Archives in Ottawa. They prepare several dozen new, very sturdy crates as well. Just in case. When Estreicher arrives in Ottawa two years later, he will state with satisfaction that ‘the tapestries have never been in such good hands’.

When the war finally comes to an end, a conflict arises among Poles. The post-Yalta order presents a new dilemma – should the tapestries be returned to what is now communist Poland? The government-in-exile has a clear view on the matter – after all, its people are the ones who have looked after the tapestries over the past few years. Furthermore, London fears a repeat of history, this time following the 19th-century scenario – namely, that Stalin will turn out to be surprisingly similar to Catherine the Great and plunder the treasure, erasing an important part of Polish identity. The Canadian episode and the attempts to seize the tapestries resemble a Cold War spy thriller.

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Opening of the temporary exhibition ‘National Treasures’ at the National Museum, 16 January 1961, photo: Stanisław Czarnogórski / PAP.

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It is thus time for another ‘evacuation’ – a clandestine transfer to the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré monastery near Quebec, organised by Wacław Babiński, a diplomat stationed permanently in Canada. To avoid suspicion, some of the less significant artefacts are left behind in the Ottawa archives.

Alfred Fiderkiewicz, an envoy from the communist Polish government, soon arrives in Canada to request the return of the evacuated treasures. Meanwhile, the former Wawel duo remain inseparable, though after 1945 they are no longer in complete agreement with each other. Krzywda-Polkowski – who later, in his memoirs, will make no secret of his animosity towards Świerz-Zaleski and accuse him of having evaded responsibility for the collections at every stage of the evacuation – now suspects his boss of possibly siding with the new authorities. So, together with Babiński, he organises another transport behind his back – to the Augustinian nuns’ hospital in Quebec. In 1948, Świerz-Zaleski returns to his wife and children, who remained in Poland – and brings 20 artefacts with him, but the tapestries are not among them. He also brings with him the museum inventories written in 1939 – which will later help in recovering the collection.

In February 1948, on the orders of Maurice Duplessis, the far-right Premier of Quebec, the local police remove the tapestries from the monastery and lock them away for years in a storeroom at the Musée de la Province de Québec. Duplessis uses them to wage a private anti-communist crusade – and to assert the province’s autonomy. Although the Canadian federal government has long since recognised the authority of communist Poland, the tapestries will remain overseas for many years. Efforts to recover them are met with numerous diplomatic disputes, including at the UN and UNESCO. The stand-off is only resolved by Duplessis’s death in 1959 and the Liberals’ takeover of power in Quebec. On 16 January 1961, the ship Krynica, with the tapestries on board, enters the port of Gdynia. On 19 January, they arrive in Kraków.

1972: Epilogue

During an exhibition of the tapestries held at the Kremlin in 1972, it is discovered by chance that not everything the Russian occupiers looted at the end of the 18th century was returned to Poland in the 1920s. In the very heart of the Soviet empire, the tapestry titled The Moral Decline of Humanity is found. It was not returned earlier because it was absent from the inventory that formed the basis of the claim. Following five years of negotiations, it returns to the country – as a gift for the rebuilt Royal Castle in Warsaw.

_{Originally written in Polish, March 2026, translated by Scotia Gilroy, April 2026}

^Sources:

^{M. Hennel-Bernasikowa,}^{Dzieje arrasów króla Zygmunta Augusta}^{, Kraków, 2011.}

^{Wszystkie arrasy króla. Powroty: 2021–1961–1921}^{, ed. J. Ziętkiewicz-Kotz, Kraków, 2021.}

^{B. Treter, ‘Wspomnienia z podróży z arrasami wawelskimi z Krakowa do Bukaresztu w 1939 r.’,}^{Ochrona Zabytków}^{, vol. 14, 1961, no. 1–2, pp. 18–32.}

^{A. Fischinger and K. Piskozub, ‘Problemy konserwatorskie arrasów wawelskich’,}^{Ochrona Zabytków}^{, vol. 14, 1961, no. 1–2, pp. 42–62.}

^{A. Merta-Staszczak, ‘Zasady zabezpieczenia i ochrony zabytków wobec zagrożenia wojną w Polsce w latach 1918–1939’,}^{Ochrona Zabytków}^{, 2019, no. 2, pp. 121–146.}

^{S. E. Nahlik, ‘Tak zwana sprawa arrasów w świetle dokumentów’,}^{Studia do dziejów Wawelu}^{, 1978, issue 4, pp. 361–396.}

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