The Cloth Hall is the object around which Krakow's Main Market Square is organised, a long hall set squarely in the middle of one of the largest medieval squares in Europe. Its function was commercial from the outset: a covered market where cloth merchants traded goods carried along the routes linking the Baltic to Hungary and the East. After a fire, the building was remodelled in the sixteenth century, when it received the ornamented Renaissance parapet and carved mascarons that define its silhouette. A nineteenth-century restoration added the open arcades and the exterior stairs, turning a market hall into a civic monument. Trading still goes on beneath the vaults, while the upper floor houses a major gallery of nineteenth-century Polish painting and sculpture. Standing within the historic centre of Krakow inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, the Sukiennice offers an unusually complete case study of how a working commercial building becomes a national symbol.
