While staying in Szczecin, Poland this summer we got the opportunity to visit this government building and take a private tour of it.  If you can find someone to give you a tour, I would highly recommend it (our “tour guide” was a close friend of a close friend and works in the building). 

    The building itself is quite stunning and is one of the few buildings in the city that was relatively untouched during the war.  The building contains several beautiful stair cases, beautiful architectural features, and interesting rooms (such as the bomb shelter in the basement… still fully stocked) that kept us engaged. 

   Formerly a German government building, it was interesting to me to see remnants of its previous occupants left behind (such as German labels painted above doors).  Along those lines as well was an extremely interesting room inside one of the towers (pictured below).  When this room was discovered and finally opened, they found inside a good number of sculptures that looked to be building features.  To this day no one knows why they were in the room, who made them, and what they were intended for… pretty cool stuff actually.  You could tell that several of the sculptures were revisions of each other… maybe idea changes by the original artist, or duplicates meant for close locations.  Several of them I wondered if were mess-ups.  I could have spent quite some time in this room alone, but alas, the tower awaited.

    Once up in the tower proper you could go outside on a walkway and the views from there were awesome.  You could walk all the way around the tower, giving you a 360 degree vantage point of the city and the river area.  Definitely worth the time spent there!

130713_scz_0142 Panorama

–Dan Thompson