Rynek Główny w Krakowie – kompozycja i funkcja na tle regularnych układów urbanistycznych średniowiecznej Europy

Abstrakt

MAIN MARKET SQUARE IN KRAKOW – ITS LAYOUT AND FUNCTION AGAINST REGULAR URBAN SPACE PLANNING IN EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The study is aimed at a reinterpretation of certain theses as to the arrangement of Main Market Square (Rynek Główny) in Kraków within the urban layout stipulated in the charter of 1257, and at situating that layout against the medieval urban planning in Europe. A comparative analysis is hampered by the scarcity of research on the measurement of modular complexes. The layout of Kraków based on the charter of 1257 was a square with the side of 13.5 sznur (lit. string; 1 sznur =  5 ells of 0.586 m [1.92 ft] each); consequently, the square area was 1 13/32 Franconian łan, consisting of nine squares with the side of 4.5 sznur each. The central square included Main Market Square, while the remaining ones were usually divided into four square blocks, with eight parcels in each block. The ideal pattern (Fig. 1) was distorted by adaptations of the previously existing elements (Fig. 2). The roots of the regular plans of the cities established on the basis of German law must be traced back to the country where that law had originated. Th e theses about the northward spread of Italian models can only be considered legitimate in individual cases (Fig. 3). In Germany the origins of the two categories of plans, i.e. the street-strip plan and the grid plan, date back to the still irregular settlements being established in the 12th and early 13th centuries. Popular in Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Silesia, in Lesser Poland (Małopolska) the street-strip plans were rare and usually replaced by the grid plans (Fig. 4); a form with a triangular plaza has survived in Zawichost (Fig. 5). A sample of importance for the regular grid creations was the layout of Wrocław, plotted apparently after the Tartar invasion in 1241. A form classifi able between the street-strip and the grid plans is the grid-strip plan (Fig. 7), developed as an adaptation of the rural nawsie, i.e. the centrally located plaza around which a village was developed (Fig. 6). Among the sophisticated forms of the grid plan are the symmetrical multi-field arrangements, either orthogonal (possibly with an emphasized crosswise axis; Figs. 9, 10), or central and centralizing (Figs. 11–13). Apart from Kraków, the most outstanding examples are Poznań (established according to German law ca 1252) and some municipalities in the Czech Republic, including České Budějovice, granted the charter from the hands of King Ottokar II of Bohemia (1263–1265), Klatovy (ca 1260), or Moravská Třebová. A comparative analysis reveals the grand scale of the layout stipulated in the charter granted to Kraków in 1257, an unprecedented example throughout Europe at that time. A type of the projection of the form of Main Market Square in Kraków is represented by Kleparz (Fig. 14). Being the centre of the city established according to German law in both ideological and usually also compositional terms, Kraków’s Main Market Square was the nucleus of different aspects of city life: the municipal authorities (the city hall appeared with the establishment of the city council), the judiciary, economy (the characteristically structured stalls), religion (the vicinity of the parish church with cemetery), water supply, prestige of the city (reflected, for instance, in the city hall tower) and of its elites (an issue of interest to social topography; reflected in the forms of the houses adjoining the square etc.), which thus implied the plaza’s both symbolical and esthetical values. The latter, though, were of interest not only to Western thinkers, since Polish King Casimir the Great warned in the privilege granted to Kraków in 1358: dummodo civitas in locis celebribus per inordinata edificia occupata non deturpetur (as long as the city is not disfi gured by building disorganized structures at its hugely attended sites).