The Princely House in Dresden

Leading from south to north, the nearly three-hundred-meter-long Schloßstraße in Dresden begins at the Palace of Culture, located at number 2, which was opened in 1969 during the times of the German Democratic Republic. It ends at the passage under the Renaissance building of Georgentor—the former city gate, which once led outside the walls and now allows crowds of tourists to reach Schloßplatz, the promenade in front of the Frederick August Bridge. A walk in the shadow of its tenement houses is a kind of journey in time, from modernity to the period of Dresden’s greatest splendor at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. About halfway there, at the corner of Schloßstraße and Sporergasse, the Princely House in Dresden (German: Fürstliches Haus in Dresden) draws attention [1].

Inscription

This tenement house, formerly marked with number 30, and now 14, contains the following inscription on the bay window:

JHWH, IEHOVAE Bonitate constantissime moriar, 1678.

The first four letters, written in Hebrew from right to left, are the consonants that make up God’s name, Jehovah [2], in their abbreviated form, called the Tetragrammaton. Already with the consonants, it forms a sentence where, to emphasize the rank of Almighty God, the name is written in capital letters. At the end, we can see the year in which the new owners rebuilt the tenement house, entrusting their lives to the Creator according to the aforementioned sentence.

An attempt to find information about this building on the Internet must necessarily start with finding it on the map. When visiting the old town, you rarely pay attention to the names of the streets, let alone their numbers. Here, however, a surprise awaits because not only is this corner house a practically empty construction site according to Google Maps, but the entire quarter as well [3] (as of 17/01/2023*).

Reconstruction

The historic Princely House in Dresden was completely destroyed during the bombing of Dresden on the night of February 13-14, 1945. Its reconstruction—only in the 21st century—was undertaken by Baywobau Dresden [4] in cooperation with IPROconsult and completed on December 31, 2021. During the reconstruction, great effort was made to faithfully replicate the old architectural elements, including the bay window and its elegant inscription.

• When I looked at this place on Google Maps a few months after writing the article, the quarter was already built up.

The article is a semi-machine translation of the original in Polish.

External links

1. [↑] A photograph of the façade from around 1900.
2. [↑] Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, Insight on the Scriptures, Volume 1, 2011, heading: Jehovah.
3. [↑] Satellite image on Google Maps.
4. [↑] Comparative press articles containing photographs devoted to the difficulties of reconstruction of the quarter in the context of planning and construction.