The Senators' Hall
1530s, tapestries mid sixteenth century
You have entered the largest room in the castle, the hall where the senate of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth sat and where the greatest court ceremonies took place. Royal weddings were celebrated here, foreign ambassadors were received, and in the seventeenth century the first Polish opera performances were staged in this space. It is a long, high chamber lit by tall windows, and its scale was meant to impress anyone who came from the smaller halls below.
The walls are hung with the largest and most spectacular tapestries of the Sigismund Augustus collection, the monumental Biblical series showing the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. Woven in Brussels around fifteen fifty from designs attributed to Michiel Coxcie, they are dense with figures, animals and landscape, and they were made specifically for these walls. Along the top runs a painted frieze, and a fine musicians' gallery projects into the room. Take your time with the Flood tapestry, where terrified people cling to rocks as the water rises around the ark.
Like the rest of the State Rooms, the Senators' Hall lost its ceiling and much of its decoration during the years when Austrian soldiers occupied the castle, and what you see is the result of careful restoration in the twentieth century. The tapestries themselves survived an even stranger journey. Evacuated in September nineteen thirty nine, they crossed Romania, France and England to Canada, where they stayed until nineteen sixty one. Their return to this hall was one of the most joyful moments in the modern history of the castle.
Did You Know? The first operas ever performed in Poland were staged in this hall in the sixteen twenties.
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