Wincenty Pol Manor House

What to expect

If you have two days in Lublin and a soft spot for old maps, the Wincenty Pol Manor House earns its bus ride. It is a small white wooden house in a garden on ul. Kalinowszczyzna, north-east of the castle hill, and it remembers a 19th-century poet and geographer whom most foreign visitors have never heard of. In the museum’s own words, it is “a biographical museum with the character of a historical house.”

Come for the globes. The branch owns more than 120 Polish-language terrestrial globes made between the 19th and the 21st century. One visitor singled out a political globe of 1938, globes showing where animals live and globes tracing the explorers’ routes. Not all of them are on display at once.

The rest of the display, in two hallways and three ground-floor rooms, holds Pol’s manuscripts, letters from Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Seweryn Goszczyński and Antoni Edward Odyniec, and paintings by his grandson Juliusz Pol.

Adjust your expectations about the rooms. The furniture is period stock chosen to match the era; nothing the family owned survived. The house you walk through was itself taken down elsewhere in the city and rebuilt here in 1969, a fact the museum states openly.

Downstairs, a basement added between 1990 and 1994 hosts a temporary show on nature, history, literature or art. Through the year the manor also hosts author readings, chamber concerts and an annual conference on Pol.

Best for literature readers, map and globe enthusiasts, and anyone who enjoys a small house museum with a person telling the story. Children under about 10 will find nothing hands-on. If you only have one afternoon in Lublin, the castle hill comes first; treat this as a second-day trip.

Tips

• Check hours on the branch page. Current opening hours and this month’s free-admission dates are on the branch’s Polish page ; look on the day you go. Each branch of the National Museum in Lublin sets its own free days, different from the castle’s.
• Do not rely on the English page. The branch’s English “Visiting” page on the museum website still shows another branch’s information and old COVID-era rules (checked 2 October 2026). Use the Polish page above with a browser translation.
• Ask about English in advance. Nothing is published about label languages or tours in English. Phone +48 81 747 24 13 or email dworekpola@mnwl.pl before you set out.
• Buy the combined ticket at the castle. Entry here is 10 PLN (8 PLN reduced). The 50 PLN pass (40 PLN reduced) covers the castle galleries, the chapel, the tower and every branch. It is sold only at the castle cash desk, so buy it before you come.
• Carry cash. The branch says nothing about cards, while a sister branch of the same museum takes cash only.
• Budget 45 to 60 minutes. The museum gives no visit length. The ground floor goes quickly; the basement show and a chat with the staff add another 15 to 30 minutes.
• The guided walk-round is free. Visitors report that the person who sells your ticket shows you round and tells the Pol family story at no charge; you can also say no and wander alone. A booked curator’s tour costs 70 PLN plus admission per person.
• Photos for private use only. No flash, no extra lights, no tripod, no publication.
• Accessibility: call first. No accessibility information is published for this building, and the museum’s “Museum without barriers” statement covers only the castle hill.

Getting there

The address is ul. Kalinowszczyzna 13, north-east of the castle hill and away from the Old Town, in a district few tourists reach.

• On foot: 15 to 20 minutes from the castle. Visitors say the route is easy to lose; steer for the Lidl supermarket on Kalinowszczyzna.
• Bus: lines 2, 22 and 25 serve the Kalinowszczyzna 01 and Kalinowszczyzna 04 stops on the museum’s street. For the way back, line 922 runs from Kalinowszczyzna 04 to Muzeum Narodowe - Zamek, the stop below the castle.
• By car: there is no museum car park mentioned; park on the street.
• Finding the door: the entrance is a wooden wicket gate next to a larger wooden gate. The house sits back behind its garden, and people walk past without noticing it.

Nearby

Pair the manor with Lublin Castle and the Holy Trinity Chapel , the parent institution, where you buy the combined pass that also covers this house.

Readers can add the Józef Czechowicz Museum , the other literary branch, devoted to the poet of interwar Lublin: same ticket prices, but its own free days and hours, so check that branch’s page separately.

The third link is a story: this house was moved here to open an open-air museum that ended up elsewhere, and that museum is now the Lublin open-air village museum on al. Warszawska.

A few minutes’ walk from the manor is Lublin’s old Jewish cemetery.

Background

Outside Poland, Wincenty Pol (1807-1872) is barely a name; inside it, he is remembered as a poet, a soldier and a scientist at once. He fought in the November Uprising against Russian rule and received the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari.

His first book of poems was printed in Paris in 1835. In 1849 he founded a chair of geography at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. It was the first in Poland and the second in Europe after Berlin - which explains why globes fill the house.

His tie to Lublin is mostly the circumstance of his birth. His father, Franciszek Ksawery Poll, an official of the Austrian administration, bought this estate in 1804, and Wincenty was born in it three years later; the family soon moved on to Lviv.

Half a century on, in 1860, the people of Lublin bought the house back as a present for the by then celebrated poet. The regional news site lubelski.pl writes that the tsarist authorities refused to let him have it, and the estate passed to his daughter Julia instead.

The museum itself dates from 2 December 1972, exactly a century after Pol died. Five years later, in 1977, it came under the Lublin regional museum, today the National Museum in Lublin.

What you visit, though, is not standing where Pol was born. In the 1960s, again according to lubelski.pl, the city wanted an open-air museum of rural architecture on Kalinowszczyzna, with its management working from this manor. The house was taken apart in 1969 and put up here as the first building of that project. The land for the rest could not be secured, so the open-air museum was built on al. Warszawska instead and the manor stayed behind, alone.

Before the move, the house stood in what had become a factory yard. Its original plot, the Firlejowszczyzna farmstead near today’s ul. Łęczyńska, was auctioned off over mortgage debts in the 1880s and then sat unsold for ten years. A Portland cement works took it over next, a bank owned it before the Second World War, and after 1945 it became part of a nationalised scales factory.