Lubomirski Palace (Opole Lubelskie)

Lubomirski Palace
Pałac Lubomirskich
Designs for the palace c1770, before it was heavily altered c1850
Location within Poland
Former names	Slupecki Palace (Słupeckich Pałac)
General information
Type	Palace
Architectural style	Baroque
Location	Opole Lubelskie
Country	Poland
Coordinates	51°09′03″N 21°58′32″E / 51.15083°N 21.97556°E / 51.15083; 21.97556
Construction started	1737
Completed	1773
Client	Antoni Lubomirski
Technical details
Floor count	3
Design and construction
Architect	Domenico Merlini

The Lubomirski Palace (pl:Pałac Lubomirskich) in Opole Lubelskie, Lublin Voivodship, Poland (formerly the Slupecki Palace - pl:Pałac Słupeckich), is a much-altered 18th-century palace formerly belonging to the Słupecki and Lubomirski families.

From the 16th century onwards the palace housed a growing collection of books - many of them theological - and also a collection of fine art paintings. The library and pictures were dispersed in the mid-nineteenth century, when ownership of the palace passed to the Russian tsarist government. The building was stripped of its baroque architectural features and used as a military barracks and hospital. It currently houses a high school named for Adam Mickiewicz.

The present form of the palace is a reconstructed barracks, carried out after 1854. The earlier reconstructions have been obliterated. Today it is a large, three-storey building on a rectangular plan with prominent projections at the ends of the façade. The interior layout is two-bay, partly changed during the subsequent reconstructions and repairs. The interior décor has not survived. In the basement the vaults are preserved, with lunettes and barrel vaulting. The northern façade looking over the courtyard has thirteen bays, separated by pilasters with Ionic capitals (finials). The middle window (slightly wider than the others) on the first floor of the façade is a remnant of the eighteenth century main entrance door, approached by flights of stone steps. The south elevation - formerly overlooking the formal garden has fifteen bays with pilasters, but with Tuscan capitals. The ground floor is rusticated, creating a base for the building.

There have been no archaeological excavations, and little is known about the former buildings which used to form a courtyard around the palace. Only an outbuilding to the south-east survives, which was turned into a hospital. It was one of Four buildings built in the eighteenth century to form a surrounding courtyard. On the foundations of outbuildings to the south-west one of the hospital buildings rises. There are no traces left of the northern outbuildings - the north-western one was demolished in 1996, the north-eastern much earlier. To the west of the palace a few old buildings the farm remain; and the granary from the late eighteenth century was converted into a cinema. A field hospital, built in the second half of the nineteenth century by the tsarist army and located south of the palace, was demolished in 2001. Also preserved is an eighteenth-century statue of St. John of Nepomuk, now in the hospital; it probably originally stood on a circular island in the ornamental pond on the north side of the palace.