The Time of the Samurai

From 25 April to 27 September 2026 the National Museum in Lublin showed nearly 600 Japanese artifacts from twelve collections at Lublin Castle, including pieces from the SAMURAI Museum Berlin never before shown in Poland. The museum’s English page for the show remains online.

The National Museum in Lublin on the exhibition:

The exhibition will feature nearly 600 original Japanese artifacts from museums in Poland and abroad, including items from the SAMURAI Museum Berlin - Peter Janssen Collection, presented for the first time in Poland. A separate section of the exhibition will be dedicated to samurai depictions in film, manga, and anime.

What to expect

Beyond the martial imagery, the exhibition covered the everyday life, religion, entertainment and art of the samurai, and a separate room dealt with their afterlife in film, manga and anime. The prints were changed in mid-July. Woodblock prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi hung until 12 July and works by Utagawa Hiroshige from 15 July, as Radio Lublin reported; the first room was closed on 13 and 14 July for the changeover.

The show was assembled from twelve collections. The museum listed five Polish national museums: Kraków, Poznań, Szczecin, Warsaw and Wrocław. The other lenders were the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology, the National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw and regional museums in Radom, Krosno and Gliwice. Anna Bielak’s private collection and the SAMURAI Museum Berlin completed the list. Around 150 objects came from Berlin, according to Radio Lublin’s report from the opening.

The highlights:

• The woodblock prints by Kuniyoshi and Hiroshige - two consecutive rotations: battle scenes and warrior portraits (musha-e) first, ukiyo-e landscapes second. According to the culture portal DlaKultury.pl, the second rotation included 53 Hiroshige prints of the “Eastern Sea Road” (Tōkaidō) from Edo to Kyoto.
• Armour, helmets and masks - together with bladed weapons, firearms and sword mounts, these formed the military core of the display.
• A sword from the museum’s earliest inventory - writing about the catalogue, the museum recalls that one of the first objects ever entered in its inventory books was a samurai sword. Hence the subject, in the museum’s 120th-anniversary year.
• A tea pavilion and a stone garden - a reconstructed tea house with mats you stepped onto with your shoes off, and a dry karesansui garden. Radio Lublin and DlaKultury.pl both noted them.
• The film, manga and anime room - a separate space on samurai imagery in contemporary culture, and the natural place to start with a teenager.

Context

The samurai were a military class that rose in Japan from the twelfth century and lost its standing only with the Meiji reforms of the 1870s. Most of what was on display dated from the long peace of the Edo period (1603-1868), when a warrior with no war to fight became an administrator, a collector and a student of calligraphy. That paradox was the exhibition’s real subject.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) worked in the same late-Edo print workshops and are now treated as the two poles of ukiyo-e. The first made his name with battle pieces and warrior portraits, the second with landscape. The museum translates ukiyo-e itself as “images of the floating world”.

The show was part of an anniversary. The National Museum in Lublin marks 120 years in 2026, counting from its formal opening on 12 December 1906. It closed the previous year with a record of more than half a million visitors, as the regional daily “Dziennik Wschodni” reported.

Tickets and time

Admission to the exhibition cost 40 PLN (standard) or 25 PLN (reduced), sold through the museum’s online ticket system and at the box office. The museum’s free-admission days did not apply: its opening-hours table marked this show “nie dotyczy” (not applicable). In the summer season the exhibition was open every day, Mondays included, from 9:00 to 18:00, and until 19:00 on Fridays and Saturdays.

An audio guide was included with the ticket, in Polish and English, plus a family trail in Polish. With close to 600 objects, a sensible visit took at least 90 minutes and realistically two hours. It suited visitors drawn to Japan, craft or printmaking, and families with children from roughly eight up.

English on site: the museum published a full English page for the exhibition and an English audio guide, and the catalogue is bilingual. It never stated whether the wall labels were in English as well.

Throughout the run the museum offered curator-led tours, tours for seniors and audio-described tours, none of them announced in English. From 7 July to 13 August it added a “Summer at the Castle” workshop programme. The last curator-led tours took place from 24 to 27 September, and the closing weekend coincided with the second round of European Heritage Days.

What the press says

No English-language coverage of this exhibition was found. The Polish reporting, in our words:

Dziennik Wschodni (11 March 2026, Jan Mazurek): previewing the anniversary year, the paper gave the museum’s record attendance of more than half a million and named the samurai show as the year’s centrepiece - link .

Radio Lublin (25 April 2026, KovA / PAP, ed. PaW): the opening-day report listed the meditation garden, the tea ceremony space and around 150 objects from Berlin - link .

Dziennik Wschodni (5 July 2026, Kamil Pomorski): an account of the “Summer at the Castle” programme - chanoyu, nō masks, calligraphy and an archery demonstration - that ran alongside the exhibition - link .

Radio Lublin (13 July 2026): a preview of the second print rotation, which the curator Małgorzata Siedlaczek said would be dominated by Hiroshige’s landscapes - link .

DlaKultury.pl (30 July 2026, Monika Borkowska): a long walk-through of the show, from the armour via the tea pavilion and the garden to the costumes and prints, clearly favourable in tone - link .

No critical review was found, as of 4 October 2026. Curator Maciej Drewniak told Radio Lublin on opening day that this was the first exhibition of its kind in the Lublin region.

Updates

• 2026-10-04 - the exhibition closed on 27 September 2026, as the museum’s exhibition page had always stated. The museum’s October opening-hours table no longer lists it. The catalogue is still on sale in the museum shop.
• 2026-09-23 - in its farewell announcement of 21 September the museum gathered the dates of its last curator-led tours, from 24 to 27 September. The exhibition ticket price (40 PLN, reduced 25 PLN) and the fact that free-admission days do not cover this show were added from the museum’s opening-hours table and its ticket system. A correction to the 14 September entry: the museum’s September programme , published on 1 September, already listed tours up to 27 September. It also listed workshops on 19 and 20 September and a talk with Professor Ewa Pałasz-Rutkowska on 20 September.
• 2026-09-14 - dates and programme checked: unchanged, the exhibition closes on 27 September 2026. Every announced accompanying event has already taken place - curator, senior and audio-described tours in May and June, and “Summer at the Castle” from 7 July to 13 August. The museum has announced nothing new for the final fortnight.

See also

• National Museum in Lublin (Lublin Castle) - the profile, with hours, prices and directions; the castle holds nine permanent displays, including the history of weaponry and the Holy Trinity Chapel with its 1418 frescoes.
• Tamara Lempicka - Beyond Borders - the museum’s collection of her work in the same castle, with no closing date; the museum’s website now lists it among the permanent displays.
• Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw - if the subject held you: a permanent Warsaw collection of Asian art, open all year.

After the show

The museum has announced no further venue, and the SAMURAI Museum Berlin’s website does not mention Lublin; no next stop was found. What remains is the catalogue : 324 pages, hardback, Polish and English texts, ISBN 978-83-68616-03-3, published by the National Museum in Lublin. It costs 170 PLN in the museum’s online shop (as of 4 October 2026).

What is on at the National Museum in Lublin now:

• Images. Art Textiles by Wojciech Sadley and Tomasz Sadley - the father’s textiles and the son’s paintings on silk, below the chapel until 18 October 2026. The closest match if the kimonos were what held you.
• Tomasz Zawadzki - abstract paintings by the Lublin artist in the gallery devoted to the “Zamek” Group and the avant-garde, until 3 January 2027.
• Jacek Antoni Zieliński - photographs used as a ground for painting, in the corridor by the Orthodox Church Painting Gallery, until 15 November 2026.

Japanese blades return to the castle later this autumn. From 20 November 2026 to 3 January 2027 its “History of Weaponry and Battle Painting” gallery will show bladed weapons donated in 1955, including nineteenth-century katana (anniversary display schedule, in Polish ).

The show drew no critical review, and the museum has not published attendance figures. The fullest account came from DlaKultury.pl (30 July 2026, Monika Borkowska), which walked through it room by room and called the Hiroshige series “a real gem” - article, in Polish . Radio Lublin (13 July 2026) covered the second print rotation, which the curator Małgorzata Siedlaczek said would be mostly landscapes - report, in Polish .

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