The story
From 1752 until 1945 the castle above the old town of Bielsko belonged to one family, the Sułkowskis. Aleksander Józef Sułkowski, a minister at the court of Augustus III of Saxony and Poland, bought the estate, and two years later he held the title Duke of Bielsko. In the mid-19th century Duke Ludwik Sułkowski remodelled the old Silesian border fortress in an eclectic style and built the chapel of St Anne as a family mausoleum. After the Second World War the castle passed to the state, and today it houses the city's Historical Museum.
The museum grew from two town collections, opened in Biała in 1904 and in Bielsko in 1906, long before the towns merged. In the castle, visitors see exposed stretches of the Gothic walls, period rooms, the restored chapel and, in the east wing, a gallery of Polish painting from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jan Matejko is there with an 1887 scene of Iwo Odrowąż, the medieval bishop of Kraków, consecrating a church foundation stone. Beside him hang Jacek Malczewski, Leon Wyczółkowski and Julian Fałat, the landscape painter who spent his last years in nearby Bystra, where his house is now a branch of the museum.
