The gift of Dr Zbigniew Śląski

A small display set inside the permanent arms and armour exhibition at Lublin Castle, one of the gift presentations with which the National Museum in Lublin marks its 120th year. This time the objects are paper rather than steel: documents, books and albums from the first years of Poland’s fight for independence. The museum publishes no English text on the jubilee displays, so the quotation below is our translation of its Polish description.

National Museum in Lublin on the exhibition:

The collection given to the museum contains unique documents and books connected with the early period of the Polish independence effort in 1914 - 1915. The display is completed by albums of material on the Polish Legions from 1914 - 1916, compiled for the Polish Legions’ inn that stood in Lublin.

What to expect

This is not a show in a room of its own. The material is set into the permanent exhibition “Historia Uzbrojenia i Malarstwo Batalistyczne” (History of Arms and Battle Painting). The museum gives no object count and publishes no images. Its description names three kinds of material, documents, books and albums, so come ready to read at close range rather than to look at uniforms or sabres.

The gift has two layers. The documents and books cover 1914-1915, the first phase of the First World War, when the Legions and other Polish independence bodies were taking shape. The albums run to 1916 and were put together for a soldiers’ inn in Lublin. The museum does not say who the donor is or when the collection arrived, and no other source we could find says either.

Around the display stands the permanent arms exhibition. According to the museum, it runs from medieval swords and arrowheads found on the castle hill, through 16th-18th-century weapons and a winged-hussar breastplate, to the Napoleonic era and the 19th-century risings. It ends with the equipment of the Polish Army of 1918-1939. The Legion papers fill the gap between the last 19th-century rising and the army of the reborn state.

This is one in a run of gift displays within the same exhibition. Over the summer it showed the decorations of Colonel Marian Żebrowski and then those of Michał Bakun, a soldier of the Polish II Corps. From 20 November the space passes to edged weapons of the 16th and 19th centuries, including Italian rapiers and Japanese katanas.

Context

The Polish Legions were formed in Kraków on 27 August 1914, on the initiative of the Supreme National Committee, as a Polish formation within the Austro-Hungarian army. Józef Piłsudski, later the founding leader of interwar Poland, commanded the First Brigade. In late July and early August 1915 Legion units fought at Jastków, about 12 km north-west of Lublin. Once the Russians withdrew, Lublin came under Austro-Hungarian occupation and became the seat of its military General Government.

The museum gives neither the name nor the address of the inn the albums were made for. The best-documented place of the kind is the Gospoda dla Legionistów (Inn for Legionnaires) at 32 Namiestnikowska Street, today Narutowicza Street. According to the Lublin daily “Dziennik Wschodni” (Agnieszka Kasperska, 30 October 2018), it opened on 31 December 1915 and ran until January 1918. In its first year it served some 20,000 lunches, and on 26 April 1916 Piłsudski himself had breakfast there.

That the albums were made for this particular inn is our inference from the dates and the place, not a fact from the museum’s description. There is also a link to the museum’s own past: in 1914 it bought former Piarist buildings on the same Namiestnikowska Street and stayed there until 1954.

Tickets and time

There is no separate ticket. The display sits inside one of the permanent exhibitions, so the permanent-exhibitions ticket, 20 PLN (reduced 15 PLN), gets you in. The museum’s price list does not mention the jubilee displays; this is our reading of the location, which the museum does not state outright. The combined ticket for the permanent exhibitions, the chapel and the tower costs 40 PLN (reduced 30 PLN), and the version that adds the temporary exhibitions costs 80 PLN (reduced 60 PLN). Both are sold only at the museum’s ticket desk.

Hours follow the permanent exhibitions, on the winter timetable for the whole run: Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday 9:00-17:00 (5 PM), Friday and Saturday 9:00-18:00. The permanent exhibitions are closed on Mondays, so do not come for this display then. Free-admission days do not fall on a fixed weekday: the museum announces them month by month on its visitor-information page (Polish). They cover the permanent exhibitions but not the tower.

Allow 15-20 minutes if you want to read the documents rather than glance at them. Permanent-exhibition tickets are also sold in the museum’s online ticket shop and at the ticket machines in the castle courtyard.

English on site: the museum’s English pages cover visiting information only and say nothing about English labels for the jubilee displays. Expect the documents themselves to be in Polish. Guided tours of the permanent exhibitions in English are available for groups of up to 30, at 250 PLN per group plus admission, booked at least a week ahead through edukacja@mnwl.pl .

Who it is for: anyone interested in how Poland regained independence, in the Legions, or in Lublin during the First World War, and readers of old print. Who can skip it: a visitor with an hour at the castle who wants the Holy Trinity Chapel and Matejko’s “Union of Lublin”. Children who came for swords and armour will find them in the same exhibition, but the papers alone are unlikely to hold them.

See also

• National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) - the museum profile: the chapel with its 1418 frescoes, the keep and nine permanent exhibitions, including the arms exhibition that houses this display.
• Museum of the History of the City of Lublin - the Krakow Gate exhibition takes the city’s story up to 1944 and gives the urban background to the Legion papers.
• Jacek Antoni Zieliński - another gift display on the permanent-exhibitions route, also until 15 November 2026; on the same reading of the price list, the permanent-exhibitions ticket covers it.
• Lublin’s History Has Many Names - portraits of the people who shaped the city, at the top of the Trinitarian Tower until 31 October 2026.

The full jubilee schedule is on the museum’s jubilee displays page (Polish only), the arms exhibition is described on its own page (Polish), and prices are on the ticket page .

Museum profile: National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) .