Although Buczacz is a small town, it has played an important role in Polish history. From the 17th century it was associated with the Potocki family. The founder of the magnificent town hall was Mikolaj Bazyli Potocki.

Buczacz - historical city
Buczacz is a small town extremely picturesquely located on several hills of the Podolska Upland, on the Strypa River, which played a very important role in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the second half of the 14th century, the then owner Michał Habdank Buczacki built a castle on the hill and issued a foundation charter for the parish in 1379.

The town was founded again in 1515, this time under the Magdeburg Law. By the 17th century, Buczacz was an important fortress, several times repelling Tartar armies ravaging the area.

A black legend shrouded the town in 1672, when the Buchach fortress was captured by the Turks, Sultan Mehmed IV resided temporarily in the castle and the town buildings were occupied and plundered by Turkish troops. In the autumn of the same year, Buczacz became the infamous site of the signing of the infamous peace treaty between the Republic of Poland and Ottoman Turkey, which, due to very unfavourable provisions, was never ratified by the Senate of the Republic.

Buczacz - residential city
As early as at the end of the 17th century, Buczacz was in the possession of the Potocki family of the Primate branch (sealed with the Golden Pilawa). In the 18th century it became the main residential town of Mikolaj Basil Potocki, starosta of Kaniów, bibliophile and collector, and above all an outstanding patron of the arts. These qualities of Potocki have unfortunately been somewhat forgotten, due to his original and at times adventurous way of life, vividly described in 19th century literature.

Despite the repair of the Buchach castle after the Turkish wars and reparation on the initiative of Nikolai Basil Potocki, the building was falling into disrepair and did not fulfil its residential functions. For this reason, Potocki built a wooden manor house for himself, located under the castle, in which he lived.

It is assumed that Potocki moved the representative functions to the town hall, which better displayed (also in sculptural decoration) the glory of the town owner. At that time Buczacz also experienced a renewed economic boom and became an important trade centre.

Buczacz - an artistic city
Potocki made his mark on the architectural landscape of Buczacz in a very distinct way. From the mid-18th century, he led a number of artistic foundations fundamentally changing the face of the city. One of the first of these was the erection of two tall columns, on pedestals topped by fragments of a beam, on which were set the statues of St John of Nepomuk and Immaculata, or the Immaculate Virgin Mary. The pedestals bore inscriptions referring to Potocki and the Pilawa coat of arms with which he had sealed his name. Art historians are convinced that the architect Bernard Meretyn (d. 1759) was responsible for the design of both columns, while Johann Georg Pinsel (d. 1761/1762) was responsible for the sculptures. Precisely dated by their inscriptions, the roadside columns are considered to be the first joint works of the two artists.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Mikolaj Basil Potocki founded a new parish church with furnishings exemplifying the works of "Lviv rococo sculpture", a small Uniate church of Pokrovna (Protection of the Mother of God), also with "Lviv" furnishings, and an Orthodox church for the Basilian Order. Nikolai Basil's largest foundation, however, was outside Buczacz. In 1771, he earmarked the substantial sum of over 2 million Polish zlotys for the construction of the Basilian church in Pochaiv. The founder, however, did not live to see the work completed, as he died in 1782 and was buried in the crypt beneath the Pochaiv church.

Buchach Town Hall
Most probably, Potocki's first major foundation in Buczacz was the erection of a magnificent town hall. Unfortunately, art historians are condemned to numerous hypotheses on the chronology of its construction, as no archival sources have survived that speak either of the beginning of its construction or its completion. It is assumed that it was erected around 1750, or, more likely, in the 1750s. Bernard Meretyn was responsible for the design, creating a body referring to the solutions of municipal architecture from the territory of the Kingdom of Bohemia, where it most likely originated.

Buczacz Town Hall and its architecture
. The Town Hall is built on a square ground plan, with a circular staircase located in the centre and running through the two storeys of the body and two successive towers. The stonework and architectural details present the whole repertoire of the most important elements used by Meretin in his designs: from the wavy, concave-convex rails in the window and door frames, through the extremely characteristic, almost 'organic' rocaille ornament, to the concave and rounded cornices of the window frames. The ideal proportions of the architecture, complemented by ornamental and figural decoration, make the Buczacz Town Hall a pearl of secular architecture in Bernard Meretyn's oeuvre.

Decoration of the Buchach town hall
. The architect entrusted Johann Georg Pinsl and his workshop with the decoration. Its subject matter, however, is not clearly legible, as Buczacz was hit by devastating fires in 1865 and 1888, during which a significant part of the stone figures decorating the balustrade of the second storey of the town hall body suffered.

Certainly, the façade highlights the person of the founder. The architectural pinnacle of this section is decorated with a large cartouche of rocaille ornament with panoplies (a decorative motif consisting of weapons and protective arms). Above it is a personification (presumably of virtue, not preserved at present) flanking an openwork composition of clouds(?), in the centre of which, in the clearance, is the metal coat of arms of the Potocki family: Pilawa, or the half-third of the cross. The whole was originally crowned with a crown.

On the sides of the gable, figures of slaves once sat on volutes (decorative elements), and allegorical figures stood below them. However, it is not known who they represented; one of them was destroyed already in the 19th century, the other was preserved without a head until the outbreak of the Second World War. On the four corners of the body of the town hall were sculptures mainly with mythological themes, taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, depicting heroes fighting against adversity. And here, unfortunately, we are not able to identify all the figures due to their destruction and the paucity of pre-war archive photographs of the entire monument. One figure was Jupiter fighting during a gigantomachy, a muscular figure riding an eagle, others were Hercules fighting a Nemean lion and Hercules fighting a Lernean hydra. The last sculpture appears to have had a religious theme, depicting David triumphing over the body of the fallen Goliath. All of the sculptures were made of stone, had very dynamic compositions, typical of Pinsel, and could be viewed from different angles, depending on which side of the town hall you passed. This variability of observation point allowed for different shots of the heroes' figures.

Buchach Town Hall now
Unfortunately, the full artistry of Bernard Meretyn's design cannot be seen today. After the end of the Second World War, the neglected town hall fell into complete ruin, the decoration of the gable was almost completely destroyed. All that remained was the large rocaille cartouche and the frame for the Pilawa coat of arms.

In 2005, during unprofessional conservation work, three sculptures (Jupiter, David and Hercules with a lion) were removed from the balustrade, two of which were made into plaster copies stored in the Johann Georg Pinsel Museum in Lviv, a branch of the Lviv Art Gallery. The originals of the sculptures are believed to be destroyed. In 2012, the last statue from the right-hand corner of the façade depicting Hercules fighting a hydra was almost completely preserved (although badly damaged),. however, in the spring of 2021, large fragments of it too broke off and fell onto the street, shattering into pieces. Of the original eleven full-size sculptures by Johann Georg Pinsel, none now exist in their entirety.