On the corner of Pilies Street and St. John's Street in Vilnius's Old Town, between the cobbles and the apartment block built in 1979, are the cellars of a palace that does not exist anymore. The Kardynalia Palace stood here from the late 16th century until 1944, when German-Soviet street fighting broke its walls open and Soviet planners decided not to put it back. For three hundred years it was a Radziwiłł family residence - among the most powerful magnate families in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - and for one stretch of those centuries it belonged to a cardinal who gave the building its name. Today it is parking, shops, and somebody's living room above a basement that used to be a Renaissance kitchen.
Beginning in 1540, Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Black - one of the most powerful nobles in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a Calvinist convert, and a sponsor of the Lithuanian Reformation - rented a complex of buildings at the corner of what was then Castle and St. John's Streets in Vilnius. The buildings had previously belonged to the Bishop of Kyiv, Jan Filipowicz, and were leased from the Vilnius cathedral canons. In 1542, Mikołaj acquired the adjoining Goštautai tenement house through right of escheat, picking up another medieval Lithuanian noble property as it came onto the market. He did not merge the two buildings; they continued as separate structures. He did establish a Calvinist congregation in the tenement house, however, in keeping with his religious convictions and his role as a patron of the Lithuanian Reformation.
Mikołaj the Black died in 1565, and the property was divided between his heirs. The Filipowicz portion passed to Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł, known as 'the Orphan,' while the Goštautai portion went to a younger relative who would eventually take a different turn entirely - Jerzy Radziwiłł, the future Cardinal and Bishop of Vilnius. Jerzy had grown up Calvinist like his father; he converted to Catholicism, rose rapidly through the Catholic hierarchy, and as soon as he could he dissolved the Calvinist congregation his father had established and converted the Goštautai tenement into a seminary administered by the Jesuits. In 1586 Jerzy reunited the two halves of the property under his ownership. In 1593 he transferred everything to his two-year-old nephew Albrecht. The palace would carry his cardinal's title - Kardynalia - for the rest of its existence.
Around 1600, Albrecht's mother Anna née Kettler oversaw a major renovation. The Goštautai half became the Radziwiłł family residence proper, while the Filipowicz half was rented out. The new residence was a two-story structure with a gateway opening onto St. John's Street and a facade topped with an attic - the kind of decorated parapet typical of Vilnius Renaissance work. Inside the courtyard were a garden, brick kitchens, brick stables, and wooden galleries running between the wings. The rented half was simpler, partly wood and partly brick. The complex was a working aristocratic household, with servants, horses, kitchens producing food for a noble family at the upper end of European wealth, and the constant movement of guests, agents, clerics, and political callers that defined a magnate residence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Damage came regularly. The great Vilnius fire of 1610 burned through the building. The Russian Muscovite occupation of Vilnius in the 1650s, during the catastrophic Russo-Polish war, did more harm. In 1677 the property passed to the Nesvizh branch of the Radziwiłł family. Katarzyna née Sobieska, widow of Michał Kazimierz Radziwiłł and aunt to the future Polish king Jan III Sobieski, oversaw post-war repairs after 1687. By that point the Radziwiłłs had largely moved their main Vilnius residence to the Voivode's Palace on Troki Street, and the Kardynalia became a secondary holding. Two more fires - in 1737 and 1748 - required further reconstruction. In 1777 Teofilia Konstancja Morawska moved in and refurbished the palace in the latest fashions, filling it with art and natural-history specimens she had collected on her travels across Europe. After her, her brother Karol Stanisław 'Panie Kochanku' Radziwiłł lived here, and after him his son Dominik Hieronim - who took the family into the Napoleonic era and died in 1813 of wounds received fighting for Napoleon.
Dominik's daughter Stefania inherited the palace and married Ludwig zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, of the same Wittgenstein family whose Russian general had stopped Napoleon at Polotsk a year before Dominik died. The couple commissioned a complete renovation that added a third floor and redesigned the facade facing Castle Street. In the 19th century the palace passed out of Radziwiłł hands and into use as a Russian government building. Then came 1944. The German-Soviet battle for Vilnius - one of the more destructive urban actions of Operation Bagration - reduced the palace to a damaged shell. Soviet authorities did not rebuild it. In 1956 the remaining walls were demolished, leaving only the eastern wing and the cellars. In 1979 the architect Aleksandras Lukšas designed a residential and commercial building for the site, and that is what stands there now. The cellars of the cardinal's palace are still down there, somewhere, beneath the floor of an apartment lobby on Pilies Street.
The site of Kardynalia Palace sits at 54.68°N, 25.29°E on the corner of Pilies and St. John's Streets in the Old Town of Vilnius, Lithuania, beside the Church of St. Johns and the courtyards of Vilnius University. View from 2,000-4,000 feet for the dense Old Town silhouette dominated by St. Stanislaus Cathedral, Gediminas Tower, and the surrounding red-tile rooftops. Nearest airport is Vilnius (EYVI), about 6 km south of the Old Town. Kaunas (EYKA) is about 100 km west.