ssible from the adjacent room), then a warming room, a day room and adjacent latrines.
The chapter house, which was the place for the convent’s daily meetings, measuring 9.7 x 9 meters, was covered with a vault based on a central, squat column with a carved capital entwined with plant springs. On this head and on wall corbels rested arch bands separating the bays of the vaults and ribs, reinforced at the intersection with bosses. One of them received a form of convex relief with four heads in contact with chins. The other three bosses are decorated with floral motifs. A similar decoration as the capital of the central column had columns and half-columns placed in the open-works (two-light openings) from the cloister side. In the Middle Ages, rows of stone benches stretched against the walls of the chapter house, while in the middle there was probably a lector’s desk. The support of the vault on one pillar at the square bays made it necessary to place the corbel on the entrance axis, which was solved by building a pillar dividing the cloister portal, where lay brothers and novices gathered during the meetings, watching the interior of the chapter house through the open-works.
The day room had a similar form and dimensions to the chapter house with a central column supporting the vault. It was a room used for brothers to perform manual work, especially in the winter. Together with the neighboring warming room, it was the only room heated in winter. On both sides of the wall separating them were heating installations, two hypocaustum furnaces with a common vent. Each of the furnaces consisted of a hearth and a grate chamber, with the hearth covered by a grate supported by brick arcades. The hearth walls were also made of bricks and the bottom was lined with large stones. The walls of the day room received very deep foundations (over 4 meters), as well as a seven-meter annex with latrines, reaching slightly beyond the riverside slope, to the drainage channel towards Pilica.
The east wing upper floor was occupied by the brothers’ bedroom, or the dormitory. It probably occupied most of the space of the east wing and was connected directly to the southern transept, where by means of night stairs brothers went to evening prayers. Mostly, dormitories on both sides were illuminated by small windows, which corresponded to individual sleeping places, although in Sulejów the cells occupied only one side, above the cloister. The mattresses since the 12th / 13th century were separated by wooden or half-timbered walls creating separate cabins, sometimes obscured by curtains, but always leaving the passage through the center of the dormitory. On the southern side of the wing, at the end of the dormitory, there were usually passages to the latrines, located on the first floor, above the sewer.
The cloister surrounding the courtyard was 5 meters wide and from the 15th century it was covered with a rib vault, which replaced the earlier wooden ceiling based on stone corbels. In the middle of the inner courtyard, herbs and vegetables were grown, it was also a place of rest, while the cloisters were used to communicate between the abbey’s rooms without the need to go outside.
The southern wing measuring 35 x 8 meters was built only in the first half of the 16th century. It housed the refectory and the abbot’s apartment. The west wing formed in the same period was fully equipped with barrel vaulted cellars, was 24 meters long and 7 meters wide. It housed, among others, the monastery gate and probably the lay brother’s rooms and reached the south-west corner of the church. Probably from the sixteenth century also came a Small Monastery, i.e. a single-track series of small rooms measuring approximately 35 x 10 meters, running parallel to the east wing and separated from it by a narrow courtyard. A row of these rooms was interrupted by the passage leading from the courtyard to the outside. A much longer building with large rooms ran from the day room to the east, along the Pilica escarpment. It housed, inter alia, the abbot’s chambers with a priva