Motesiczky Palace

The Motesiczky Palace was built on the site of a ditch in front of the medieval city wall that once surrounded the Bratislava city center, now demolished. One of the most famous accommodations of the medieval-early modern city, the Inn Addressed to the Wild One, stood on this site. The most famous and distinguished guests stayed in this inn on the occasion of national assemblies and royal coronations. Later, Sámuel Mikoviny (1698-1750), a Hungarian mathematician, engineer, and creator of Hungarian cartography, who was associated with Bratislava at several stages of his life, lived here. He first lived in the city as a student of the Lutheran gymnasium. During his second period in Bratislava, the already experienced, brilliant engineer was employed as the chief engineer of Bratislava County from 1725. ; The current palace was built in 1840 by the Baron Motesiczky family in a classicist style, with neo-Renaissance elements. The southern, originally four-storey main façade of the large house, which also has two street-facing facades, is dominated by strict symmetry. The semicircular main gate opens in the axis of its rusticated ground floor, through which we can reach the vaulted carriage driveway and further on to the square, enclosed inner courtyard. The central part of the façade is dominated by the first-floor balcony resting on consoles and the huge, triangular tympanum rising above the main cornice. During the most recent renovation, modern, colored glass sculptures were placed in its field. ; One of the historical landmarks of the building is that the Bratislava casino operated on its first floor, where the most distinguished members of the Hungarian nobility and aristocracy also regularly visited. ; The building began to gradually deteriorate after World War I, a process that continued during the socialist period following 1945. Finally, recently, between 2008 and 2010, it was renovated to a luxurious standard and the existing four floors were extended by several floors according to the designs of the Czech star architect Bořek Šípek. The resulting building, which includes 22 luxury apartments, has been awarded a five-star rating, which is rare in all of Central Europe.