Wawelberg

The Wawelbergs were a Polish family whose banking house was active in both Congress Poland and the Russian Empire.

The Russian branch was founded by Hyppolite Wawelberg (1843–1901). The first Wawelberg Bank had its origins in a loan office that began operating in the early 1840s. In 1869 young Hyppolite Wawelberg moved to St. Petersburg where he launched a new venture, the Wawelberg Bank. Hyppolite Wawelberg's Polish-Jewish connections (Wawelbergs were Jewish) remained strong, and the bank was generally known as having two separate centers - in Warsaw and in St. Petersburg. The first location of Wawelberg Bank was 25 Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg (House of the Parish of Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral, now housing department store and SAS - Scandinavian Airlines System offices). Hyppolite Wawelberg made a fortune in Russia though he was equally well known as a generous philanthropist.

The new Polish Kingdom (Polish: Królestwo Polskie; Russian: Korolevstvo Polskoe), as created by the Congress of Vienna, was a Polish entity but was in personal dynastic union with Imperial Russia, since the reigning Romanov Tsar was also king of Poland. Though based in St. Petersburg, the Wawelbergs were instrumental to the development of finance in the Polish Kingdom. They were to Congress Poland what the Medicis were to Florence, the Fuggers to Augsburg, the Rothschilds to France, and the Mellons to the late-19th-century United States.

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