he 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 private chapel in the south, the monks’ cells on the west, a scriptorium and a library, and from the east economic buildings.
Since the 12th century the church and abbey was defended by a moat about 5 meters wide and about 2 meters deep, and probably an earth ramparts with a palisade, while the least fortified southern side was naturally protected by the Pilica River. At the end of the Middle Ages, the whole was surrounded by a ring of pentagonal late gothic fortifications in the form of a curtain wall and six towers (including two gate towers) surrounding an area of about 12,000 m2. Four towers were erected on a quadrangle plan, one on a semicircular plan, and one was cylindrical. The wall was about 7 meters high, 1.1 meters thick and loop holes were pierced in it. On the southern side, due to the river, its construction was abandoned. The defensive barrier there could have been monastery buildings set on the edge of the escarpment, and the latrine as the tower extended beyond escarpment, which, judging by the thickness of the walls, could be adapted for defensive tasks.
In the south-west corner there is a semicircular Moorish Tower protecting the nearby wicket gate. It received four floors with a height of 12 meters and an internal span of 6 meters. Communication between its first and third floor was provided by stairs in the thickness of the wall, and at a height of 7 meters there were passages leading to the adjacent defensive wall-walks in the crown of the walls. At the confluence of the eastern and northern sections of the fortifications, the Abbot’s Tower was erected, protruding from the face of the wall, four-sided, with an internal diameter of 5 meters and a height of just over 15 meters. Its timber ceilings divided the interior into four floors, the stone body constituting the base of the brick upper floor of a larger diameter, based on stone corbels, between which machicolation was created. From the north-east, north and west, the defense was provided by the remaining towers located at intervals of about 35