Stained Glass Museum

What to expect

The windows you will photograph in St Mary’s Basilica, the Franciscan church and Wawel Cathedral were made at this address, and windows are still being made here now. This is a working studio that lets visitors in, not a gallery of backlit panels. Settle that distinction before you buy a ticket, because everything else follows from it.

The tour walks you between drafting tables, kilns and racks of coloured glass. You see full-size design cartoons, sheets being cut to shape, lead came, and the stages of assembling a window. Someone is usually working at the benches, and by every visitor account that is the part people remember: you can put your questions to the artist holding the piece, not only to the guide. The studio still takes commissions from churches, institutions and private collectors, so what sits on the workbench changes from month to month.

Best for anyone who has already seen Krakow’s famous windows and wants to know how they were made, and for anyone interested in craft or in Art Nouveau. Children from five have their own Saturday tour at 10:00 with a workshop. If you prefer to move through rooms at your own speed and double back to what caught your eye, skip it: entry is by guided tour only, at a fixed time, and it lasts 45 minutes - up to an hour if the group asks a lot of questions.

One caveat matters more than the rest. A tour only runs once two people have turned up. A solo visitor walking in off the street may be asked to wait for the next slot or told there is nothing to join today.

Tips

• Book online for a named time. The museum’s booking system guarantees you a place on a specific tour; the desk can only sell you a ticket if that slot still has room. With the two-person rule in force, booking is also how you avoid being turned away at the door.
• The language of the tour sets the price. The English tour is 80 PLN, with a family ticket (2+2) at 256 PLN. The Polish tour is 60 PLN and 192 PLN for the family ticket. Children under four go free. If someone in your group speaks Polish, the cheaper slot is a real option.
• There are only a few tour times. English at 12:00 and 15:00, Tuesday to Saturday. Polish at 12:30 and 15:30, with extra Saturday slots at 11:30, 13:30 and 16:30. Outside those times the building is open but you cannot go in - plan around the tour times, not the opening hours.
• Labels are not the point, the guide is. Everything reaches you through the guide, so the English tour is the whole of the English provision. There is no audio guide to fall back on and no self-guided route.
• Allow 45 minutes, or three hours with a workshop. The tour alone runs 45 to 60 minutes. Tour-plus-workshop packages, where you make a small panel yourself, start at 280 PLN and take three hours. There is a cafe in the building for afterwards.
• No pushchair access. Visitors consistently describe narrow winding stairs and no way through with a pushchair; bring a sling or a carrier for a small child. The museum publishes no accessibility information - call before visiting.
• Take the stained glass map. The museum hands visitors a map of Krakow buildings holding windows from this studio - St Mary’s, Wawel Cathedral, the Franciscan church, the old Savings Bank on Szpitalna, the House under the Globe on Długa. It turns a 45-minute visit into a key to half the city centre.
• Groups of ten or more book separately. The museum will open other times for them by phone or email.

Getting there

Tram: the stop is Muzeum Narodowe on al. Krasińskiego, essentially at the door. It is the same stop you would use for the National Museum’s main building.

On foot: about 20 minutes from the Main Market Square along Zwierzyniecka and out to the Aleje Trzech Wieszczów ring road. From the Błonia meadow or the Dębnicki Bridge it is a few minutes either way.

By car: the address sits in the paid parking zone on one of the city’s busiest arteries, with no car park at the building. For a 45-minute visit the tram is simply easier.

Nearby

Fifteen minutes on foot, on Krupnicza, is the Józef Mehoffer House . Mehoffer designed windows that were executed here, among them the History of the Holy Cross in Wawel Cathedral, which took a gold medal in Paris in 1925. The two addresses explain the whole mechanism: the design was drawn at one, the glass cut at the other.

The other half of that story sits at the Wyspiański Museum - the cartoons and designs of the artist whose God the Father window in the Franciscan church came out of this studio. A few minutes further along the avenue, by the Błonia meadow, stands the National Museum’s Main Building , and across the Vistula at Rondo Grunwaldzkie the Manggha Museum of Japanese art .

Background

The Krakow Stained Glass Workshop S.G. Żeleński was founded in 1902 by the architect Stanisław Gabriel Żeleński. The building at al. Krasińskiego 23 went up in 1906-1907 on his initiative, designed for one purpose: high rooms, large windows, a plan subordinated to daylight, because glass cannot be judged without it. That is why the tour takes you through an original interior rather than a conversion.

Żeleński was killed in 1914, in the first months of the war, and his widow Izabela ran the firm afterwards. The workshop was nationalised in 1952 and spent the following decades inside the cooperative system. In 2000 the artist Piotr Ostrowski bought it; he opened the museum in 2004 and remains its artistic director. Production has run in this one building since 1902, which is rare enough in Polish craft that the continuity, more than any single object, is the real exhibit here.