Fortuna's Cellar in Lublin

What to expect

Fortuna’s Cellar in Lublin is one room, and your ticket buys you that room and nothing else. Under the Lubomelski Tenement at Rynek 8, on the Old Town Market Square, a single low chamber has its walls and vault covered end to end by painting roughly four hundred years old. There is one entry a day, at 12:00, always with a guide, and a maximum of ten people go in at a time.

Fortuna herself stands at the centre of the vault, balanced on a sphere set in a shell, and the room is named after her. Below run nine scenes, seven of them copied from Emblemata saecularia, an album printed in Frankfurt am Main in 1596 by the brothers Johann Theodor and Johann Israel de Bry. The other two come from engravings by the Nuremberg printmaker Heinrich Ulrich.

An emblem is a picture with a text, so cartouches carry captions in Latin and German, and the whole surface is laced with acanthus, roses and carnations. Over the fireplace sits a monkey holding a mirror. A single window looks out at pavement level.

What makes this worth a stop is narrow and specific, so it is worth being clear about it. Secular burgher wall painting of the 17th century barely survives in Poland, and the source here was not a pattern book but a sztambuch, the private album in which a 16th-century traveller collected friends’ inscriptions. In the centre’s own words, this is “the only interior known to us, in which this kind of decoration can be found - based on an album”.

Best for anyone who reads iconography for pleasure, for visitors interested in Renaissance emblem culture, and for travellers who would rather have one object explained properly than walk a large display alone. There is nothing here for children: a dark room, no screens, and all the content in the guide’s talk, which is in Polish. If you want the story of the city rather than a single monument, the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin in the Kraków Gate costs 10 PLN and covers the lot.

Tips

• Book the day before, not on the day. There is one tour and ten places. Online sales at bilety.teatrnn.pl open a month ahead and close one hour before the tour according to the English page, thirty minutes according to the Polish one - do not test the gap. The only counter selling tickets in person is the centre’s Information Centre at ul. Grodzka 21 (Mon-Fri 9:30-16:30), and it sells only what has not gone online.
• A tour in English costs 45 PLN, not 30. The 30 PLN ticket (20 PLN reduced) buys the talk in Polish. On site you can use written descriptions in English, German, Russian and Ukrainian. A guided tour in a foreign language is 45 PLN (35 PLN reduced) and has to be arranged in advance on +48 780 072 013 or at fortuna@tnn.lublin.pl .
• Allow 30 to 40 minutes and expect less. The centre puts the visit at 10 to 40 minutes depending on how interested the group is; a Polish travel blog reports about half an hour. That is 30 PLN for roughly thirty minutes, among the steepest price per minute of any museum in Lublin. Worth it if you came for the painting. Not worth it if you came for a museum.
• Ignore anything promising ten multimedia rooms. The nine themed rooms of city history opened here in 2012 are still listed as closed for renovation by the Lublin City Office, and the centre is preparing a new exhibition. Guidebooks and reviews describing multimedia displays describe what was here before 2018.
• Arrive five minutes early. That is what the staff ask for. Show the ticket on paper or on a phone screen, with proof of entitlement if you booked a reduced one.
• The 95 PLN pass is sold in one place only. It covers four sites of the Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre: the Grodzka Gate exhibition, the House of Words, the Lublin Underground Route and this cellar. It costs 95 PLN (67 PLN reduced), runs for 30 days and is sold exclusively over the counter at ul. Grodzka 21 - so the decision has to be made before you reach the Market Square.
• Fourteen steps, no handrails, no lift. Ten steps outside (eight of 15 cm, two of 21 cm), then a small landing and four more of 14 cm; the painted room sits lower still behind a 9 cm threshold and a doorway 74 cm wide. There is no ramp, no lift, no toilet and no alternative way in. The Old Town paving is rough granite sett before you even get there.
• Ask for the tactile plates. Blind and partially sighted visitors can request tyflografiki, raised reproductions of the murals, and the cellar’s website carries a filmed walk-through with Polish Sign Language interpretation. There is no induction loop and no interpreter on site. Guide dogs are welcome.

Getting there

The cellar is in the red tenement at Rynek 8, next door to the German consulate, with the visitor entrance on the facade, up steps from the Market Square.

• Bus: every useful line stops at Brama Krakowska, the Kraków Gate. Stop Brama Krakowska 02 is served by lines 04 and 39, Brama Krakowska 04 by 01, 06, 17, 23, 156 and 160, Brama Krakowska 01 by 01, 04, 06, 17, 39, 156 and 160, and Brama Krakowska 03 on ul. Lubartowska by 05, 22 and 52.
• On foot: from the Kraków Gate it is about five minutes uphill along ul. Bramowa. The sandy-coloured Crown Tribunal stands in the middle of the square. Walk along its north side, keeping the Tribunal on your right; the Lubomelski Tenement is on your left, just past its far corner. Coming from the cathedral, walk through the Trinity Gate instead.
• By car: the nearest car park is on Plac Katedralny at ul. Królewska 10 - paid, unguarded, open around the clock, with two accessible bays. The alternative is Parking Arkady between ul. Świętoduska and ul. Lubartowska, open 08:00-18:00, paid to an attendant.
• From the station: Lublin Główny is about 3 km out; the bus to the Kraków Gate plus the walk uphill takes roughly 25 minutes, so leave the station by 11:20 for a 12:00 tour.

Nearby

The obvious pairing is the Lublin Underground Route , run by the same centre: 280 metres of linked cellars under the square, entered at the Crown Tribunal a hundred and fifty metres away. Its standard daily entry is at 14:00, which makes a single morning below ground: Fortuna first, the Underground Route after. The Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre at ul. Grodzka 21 is the parent institution, home of the “Lublin. Memory of the Place” exhibition about the city’s vanished Jewish quarter, and the only counter that sells the four-site pass. The fourth branch, the House of Words - Chamber of Printing on ul. Żmigród, completes that pass and inverts the experience: instead of looking at a monument you set type and print a sheet yourself.

Background

The house at Rynek 8 first appears in the records in 1522. A stone slab in its carriage passage carries the Lubomelski coat of arms Zadora, the date 1540 and the inscription IAN LVBOM, left by the Renaissance rebuilding under Jan Lubomelski; the family held the property for over a century and supplied Lublin with jurors, councillors and mayors. The painting of the cellar is credited to Erazm Lubomelski, owner from 1573 to 1586, and 1596, the year the source album was printed, fixes the earliest possible date for the murals.

A date of 1679 scratched into the plaster shows people were still coming down here late in the 17th century. Around 1782 the owner walled up the windows and entrances, and the room disappeared for a hundred years, until Maria Ronikierowa described the paintings in a Lublin guidebook in 1901. Conservation began under Józef Edward Dutkiewicz in 1937 and was cut short by the war; the German occupation authorities cleaned and overpainted the murals in 1942.

Further conservation campaigns followed in 1960, 1974, 1982, 1998-1999 and 2007. Ownership had long since moved on - the Szerer family from 1661, the Szuarts from 1711, the Chruścielewskis from 1815 and the Jewish community from 1904. The cellars opened to paying visitors in 2012, and the Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre has run them since February 2018.