Lost Wawel and the Rotunda of Saints Felix and Adauctus
late tenth or early eleventh century
Beneath the floor of the old royal kitchens the museum has opened up a window into the earliest centuries of the hill. The centrepiece is the foundation of a small round church, the Rotunda of the Virgin Mary, later known as the Rotunda of Saints Felix and Adauctus. It dates from around the year one thousand, the time of the first Polish rulers, and it is one of the oldest surviving stone buildings in Poland. What remains are the lower walls of a central circular space with four semicircular apses opening off it, like a clover leaf, built of small blocks of local limestone.
The form is worth a moment of attention. Rotundas of this kind belong to the first wave of Christian architecture in central Europe and are related to buildings in Bohemia and Hungary. The apses would have held altars, and the whole structure was probably vaulted and lit by tiny windows. Around the rotunda the exhibition shows other finds from beneath the hill: fragments of Romanesque buildings, a reconstruction of the medieval hill as a model, pieces of ceramic stove tiles and everyday objects that give texture to life on Wawel long before the Renaissance castle existed.
The rotunda was discovered during excavations in the years before the First World War, when Polish archaeologists finally had access to the castle after the Austrian army left. The exhibition called Lost Wawel was created to display what they found, and it has been modernised several times since. It is quieter than the State Rooms and is a good choice for anyone who wants to understand how a wooden stronghold on a limestone rock became the seat of a kingdom.
Did You Know? The little four-leafed rotunda is roughly a thousand years old, which makes it one of the oldest stone buildings anywhere in Poland.
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