Old town hall in Mladá Boleslav, Renaissance town hall in Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic
The Old Town Hall is a two-storey Renaissance building with an L-shaped plan and two towers: a taller square tower and a shorter round one. Its facade carries sgraffito with biblical motifs, including apostles on the ground floor and St Wenceslas and St George above. The square tower holds a clock and a gallery at 31.8 m.
Matteo Borgorelli, an Italian architect working for the Krajíř family, built the L-shaped town hall with two towers in 1554–1559. It served as the seat of the town council until 1868, when a new municipal building was completed near the Church of the Assumption. Fires in the 17th and 18th centuries, including one in 1710 that started in the tower from a stove protecting the clock mechanism, forced repeated repairs. A major reconstruction begun in 1939 restored the Renaissance details and replaced the 1822 northern wing.
The sgraffito on the square-facing facade shows the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and Peter at ground level, with Saint Wenceslas and Saint George fighting the dragon above; a Latin inscription translates as "Guard justice, you who judge the land." The figures were whitewashed over and rediscovered in 1899, and the facade was restored and completed in the 1940s.
The building closes the northern end of Staroměstské náměstí, next to the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The lookout tower with its gallery at 31.8 metres is open to the public from May to September, while the city gallery inside is open year-round. The historic wing, house no. 69, has been a protected cultural monument since 3 May 1958.
The bells reached the east tower only after a fire destroyed the nearby bell tower in 1761. That tower also held a clock from the start and was lived in: two flats housed the watchmen and their families. A 1710 fire began in the tower itself, from the stove protecting the clock mechanism against freezing.
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