Jakab Palace — A Nineteenth-Century Fantasy Made from Modern Wealth
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Transcript
Jakab Palace was built in the late nineteenth century by the Jakab family, entrepreneurs connected with construction and brickmaking. Its picturesque towers deliberately evoke older architecture while using the wealth and technologies of an industrializing city.
That makes the palace almost the opposite of a medieval survival. It is modern Košice imagining the Middle Ages.
In 1945 the building briefly served as a residence for Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš during the political re-establishment of Czechoslovakia. A private historicist house thus acquired a short but important state function after the Second World War.