Holy Spirit Gate and hospital ruins

The view shows the now-defunct hospital ruins and gates belonging to the Holy Spirit complex, situated in a part of the Krakow suburbs (today Krakowskie Przedmieście 1 and the beginning of Świętoduska Street). The church with the hospital was endowed by Lublin burghers in 1419. Earlier, around the mid-fourteenth century, there was a brick hospital building and perhaps a wooden church building, located outside the city walls in accordance with medieval recommendations,. Initially, the hospital was designed for twelve patients but with time it was expanded. As a result of the decline of the Holy Spirit’s benefice in the middle of the 17th century, the Lublin councillors brought Carmelites here to save the church and the hospital. Part of the hospital was demolished, and the monks erected their buildings in this place. Also at that time, the provost of the Holy Spirit lost a lot of land to the order.

The lithograph depicts the west wing of the hospital situated along today’s Świętoduska Street. It was the longest-preserved fragment of the building. The building was in some parts one-story, in other two-story, topped with a beautiful Renaissance attic, and with a wing with the shape of an elongated quadrilateral. It drew attention also due to the diagonally inclined western wall (as a result of its reinforcement with a buttress) and evenly placed windows, which made the building resemble a prison. After its demolition in 1858, barracks for the fire brigade were erected in its place in 1875 along with a tenement house with a pharmacy on the side of Krakowskie Przedmieście. Together with the hospital wing, the Świętoduska Gate, through which for a long time led the only road to the city from the east (through Kalinowszczyzna, Wołyńska, Ruska, Szeroka, Kowalska, św. Ducha streets) was demolished. The gate was from the mid-17th century and had a residential floor above its passage. The building closed the exit of Sw. Ducha st. and at the same time had a defensive function.

The view is an important iconographic document; it shows, from the north side (from Zielona Street), one of the most beautiful landscapes of Lublin: the gate and the hospital just before the demolition. On the left, a hospital is shown in perspective; at the edge is a back of a building or a partition wall. The tenement houses on Świętoduska Street, visible on the right, are currently being rebuilt.

Renata Bartnik