The Last Thatched Roofs

Thatched cottages, farmyards and wayside shrines around Janów Lubelski, photographed for decades by a local engineer for love, not money. The Regional Museum in Janów Lubelski, a small town 61 kilometres south of Lublin in eastern Poland, shows them from 12 August to 30 October 2026 in the former prison at ul. Ogrodowa 3a, and admission is free. The museum publishes no English text; the words below are our translation of its Polish description.

Regional Museum in Janów Lubelski on the exhibition:

The exhibition presents some 60 photographs by Tadeusz Stolarz, a native of Antolin, who from the 1960s onwards, out of sheer passion, documented the villages of the Janów district - among them Antolin, Wierzchowiska, Batorz, Zdziłowice and Godziszów. He photographed wooden buildings, farmsteads and wayside shrines, preserving the image of places that changed beyond recall over the decades that followed.

What to expect

This is a documentary show, not an art exhibition: around 60 prints from one man’s private archive. Next to them stand objects from the museum’s ethnographic collection. According to the museum’s report on the opening, they are tools for harvesting, threshing and cleaning grain and for making bread. The museum’s reasoning is simple: the same rye gave grain for the loaf and straw for the roof, so the tools show the year’s work that ended up as thatch.

Tadeusz Stolarz never took photographs for a living. An engineer by training, he designed and built, and took photographs in his own time. He has also written several studies of the history of villages in the district, including a book on the Janów area during the Second World War. The show opened on 12 August 2026 at 18:00, a few days before his 91st birthday.

The same photographs were shown once before, in nearby Modliborzyce in the 1990s. The museum notes that even then few thatched cottages were left, and that today most have vanished without trace. The museum calls the photographs a document of a vanishing landscape: they show the villages as they were half a century ago.

The museum names neither the room nor a visiting time. Allow 30-40 minutes for the photographs and the tools, plus a quarter of an hour if you want to walk round the outside of the old prison. That is our estimate.

Context

Thatch (strzecha in Polish) is a covering of straw or reed on a steep roof. Village thatchers traditionally used long rye straw, threshed by hand with a flail so the stalks stayed whole; any grain left in the straw would sprout on the roof and draw mice. Straw rots quickly, so it is rarely used now, and new thatch is usually reed.

The venue is a listed building in its own right. The prison was built in 1825-1826 to a design by Wacław Ritschel as a house of correction for 130 inmates and gained an extra storey after 1883. It was closed in June 1945, weeks after units of the anti-communist independence underground stormed it at night and freed the women held there.

Tickets and time

Free admission. The museum states plainly that the exhibition is free. It says nothing about booking for individual visitors.

Opening hours: phone first. The footer of the museum’s website gives Monday to Friday 7:30-15:30 (7:30 AM to 3:30 PM), with no weekend hours and no seasonal change. Its “Zwiedzanie” (visiting) page, however, is empty, and the museum does not say whether those hours apply to the exhibition room at ul. Ogrodowa 3a or only to the office at ul. Jana Zamoyskiego 52. A call to +48 15 872 46 79 settles it; expect to speak Polish.

The last day is Friday 30 October 2026. If the footer hours also cover the exhibition room, it is closed at weekends, so plan the trip for a weekday.

Access: the former prison has no lift, and the museum does not say which floor the show is on. The building at ul. Ogrodowa 3a does have a toilet adapted for disabled visitors.

Getting there: Janów Lubelski has no passenger railway. Come by car, about an hour from Lublin via the S19 expressway, or by bus from Lublin via Kraśnik to the bus station in the town centre; Kraśnik is also the nearest railway station. Both museum addresses are in the centre, a few minutes’ walk apart.

Who it is for: above all for people from the Janów district and for visitors tracing family roots there, who may recognise a village, a grandparents’ house or a roadside shrine. It also suits anyone interested in wooden rural architecture or documentary photography. Skip it if you are after art photography or a modern museum display: this is an enthusiast’s archive and a set of farm tools in a modest room.

English on site: the museum states nothing about English labels or tours, and its website has no English version. Assume Polish-only captions.

See also

• Guciów Farmstead in Roztocze - an 18th-century thatched cottage, a barn and a granary, with free entry to the village buildings; what survives only on Stolarz’s prints still stands there.
• Unexpected Pająki at the Museum of the Chełm Land - folk hanging ornaments of straw, tissue paper and fabric from the Lublin region, until 31 October 2026. The same village straw, this time under the ceiling rather than on the roof.
• Regional Museum in Kraśnik - 40 kilometres to the north, a regional museum fitted out from scratch after its 2020 rebuild; a good companion to a trip to Janów.

Museum profile: Regional Museum in Janów Lubelski .