Textiles Restoration Workshop
It is the oldest Wawel restoration workshop. It was established in 1928 to look after King Sigismund Augustus’s tapestries, reclaimed from Russia, and various purchased
textiles. Currently it has new spacious rooms, good technical equipment, a laundry, a dying room, a modern loom and a vacuum table. There are 10 employees. The main aim of the workshop, apart from current preventive work and monitoring of the condition of items in storage facilities and exhibitions, is to prepare items for permanent exhibitions in royal chambers or for temporary exhibitions. Long-term restoration and protection work is conducted, and textile elements of militaria (e.g. caparisons or saddles) and upholstery are restored. The workshop has conducted complex restoration of large scale objects, e.g. a 17
th-c Turkish tent, won in the battle of Vienna in 1683 (wall height 3.65m; perimeter 35.30m), or Sigismund Augustus’s figural and emblem tapestries (Noah’s Conversation with God, tapestries with the coats of arms of Poland and Lithuania and figures of
Victoria or
Ceres, or a grotesque with the king’s initials (SA) and a globe). Recently
The Building of the Tower of Babel tapestry has been restored (4.80 x 8.12 m). Also, for the first time on such a scale, the gluing and pointing of the silk painted banner of the Zamoyski Ordnance infantry from the mid 18
th c. has been undertaken. It had been sown onto a string mesh and at present it is undergoing removal from this potentially dangerous ‘strengthening’ requiring painstaking care. Serious gaps in a 17
th-c Brussels tapestry with a mythological theme are also being repaired. The tapestry is to be part of the permanent exhibition in Pieskowa Skala castle. The textile decoration of the Baroque bed from Podhorce (France and Poland, c. 1700), traditionally related to John III Sobieski is also undergoing systematic restoration.
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