Fortuna's Cellar in Lublin

What to expect

Book Fortuna’s Cellar in Lublin for one painted room and nothing else. You go down beneath Rynek 8, on the Old Town Market Square, at 12:00, with a guide and no more than nine other visitors; this is the only scheduled tour of the day. Every surface of the chamber, walls and vault alike, is covered in painting roughly four centuries old.

The guide is the point of the visit, because each picture down here is an emblem: an image paired with a motto, meant to be decoded rather than admired. Nine scenes can still be read, Fortuna on the vault included. Seven are copied from Emblemata saecularia, an album the de Bry brothers printed in Frankfurt in 1596. The other two, Amor with Venus and Fortuna herself, follow engravings by Heinrich Ulrich of Nuremberg.

Pay attention to the fireplace: its cone-shaped hood is one of the painted fields, showing a monkey holding a mirror in which a second monkey’s head is reflected. Look up last: the naked goddess with a wind-blown cloth gave the room its name, and the Latin verse beside her, on the fickleness of luck, is by the poet Cornelius Schonaeus. Expect damage low down, where damp destroyed the plaster up to about a metre, and ask which figures are original, as some were later restored wrongly.

Why cross a city for a single room? In 1971 the historian Stanisław Tworek wrote that no comparable secular decoration was known elsewhere in Poland. And the model here was a friendship album, the kind a student carried on his travels for friends to sign. In the centre’s own words, this is “a rare, if not the only, transfer of graphics” from that album to a wall.

Go if you enjoy reading images, care about Renaissance emblem books, or would rather have one object explained properly than walk past a hall of display cases. Skip it with young children: it is a single room with no screens, and everything rests on a talk given in Polish. If you want the whole city’s story, the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin in the Kraków Gate charges 10 PLN.

Tips

• Buy online, a day or more ahead. Ten places, one scheduled tour. Sales on bilety.teatrnn.pl open a month in advance; the English page says they close an hour before the tour, the Polish page half an hour, so take the hour as your deadline.
• Unsold places go over the counter at ul. Grodzka 21. The centre’s Information Centre sells whatever was not bought online. Its own website gives two different sets of opening hours for that desk, so check the visit planning page before walking over.
• A tour in English costs 45 PLN and needs a booking. The standard 30 PLN ticket (20 PLN reduced) gets you the Polish talk plus a written guide in English, German or Ukrainian. An English-speaking guide is 45 PLN (35 PLN reduced), arranged in advance on +48 780 072 013 or at fortuna@tnn.lublin.pl.
• Plan on 40 minutes, but it may be 20. The centre quotes anything from 10 to 40 minutes depending on the group, and a Polish travel blog timed it at about half an hour. Thirty PLN for half an hour is a high rate in Lublin, where the city history museum charges 10 PLN.
• Listings that promise multimedia rooms are years out of date. The ten-room multimedia show next to the cellar ran from 2012 to 2018. Since the second half of 2022 those rooms have held Teatr Imaginarium, a separate hand-built walk through Lublin’s legends run by the same centre, which a Dziennik Wschodni reporter found takes over an hour.
• The four-site pass is sold only at the Grodzka 21 desk. For 95 PLN (67 PLN reduced) it covers the Grodzka Gate, the House of Words, the Lublin Underground Route and this cellar for 30 days. You cannot buy it online, so decide before you reach the square.
• Be there five minutes early. The staff ask for it. A ticket on a phone screen is fine; bring proof of entitlement for a reduced one.
• No lift, no handrails, fourteen steps. Ten steps outside rise 15 to 21 cm each, and four more of 14 cm follow a small landing inside. The painted room lies behind a 9 cm threshold and a 74 cm doorway, with no ramp, toilet or other way in.
• Blind and deaf visitors have more than the site admits. Tactile reproductions of the murals are available on request, guide dogs may enter, and the cellar’s website hosts a filmed tour with Polish Sign Language. There is no induction loop and no interpreter on site.

Getting there

Look for the red house at Rynek 8, next door to the German consulate; the visitor door is in the facade, reached by steps from the square.

• Bus: get off at any of the four Brama Krakowska (Kraków Gate) stops. Lines 01, 04, 06, 17, 39, 156 and 160 use stop 01, while 04 and 39 use stop 02. Lines 01, 06, 17, 23, 156 and 160 call at stop 04, and 05, 22 and 52 at stop 03 on ul. Lubartowska.
• On foot: walk uphill along ul. Bramowa from the Kraków Gate, about five minutes. The Crown Tribunal fills the middle of the square; keep it on your right along its north side, and the Lubomelski house is on your left past its far corner. From the cathedral, come through the Trinity Gate.
• By car: Plac Katedralny, ul. Królewska 10, is the closest car park: paid, unguarded, open around the clock, with two accessible bays. Parking Arkady, between ul. Świętoduska and ul. Lubartowska, opens 08:00-18:00 and you pay an attendant.
• From Lublin Główny station: no published walking time exists; with one tour a day, leave the station at least 45 minutes before noon.
• Underfoot: the whole Old Town is paved with rough granite setts, which a wheelchair user or anyone in heels will feel before reaching the steps.

Nearby

Make a morning of it with the Lublin Underground Route, the same centre’s 280-metre chain of cellars beneath the square, entered at the Crown Tribunal about 50 metres away. Its standard entry is at 14:00, so Fortuna at noon leaves time for lunch in between. Teatr Imaginarium, behind a carved door in this same cellar, has no page on our site yet.

The pass that covers both is sold at ul. Grodzka 21, home of the parent Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre and its “Lublin. Memory of the Place” exhibition on the city’s lost Jewish quarter. The fourth site on that pass, the House of Words - Chamber of Printing on ul. Żmigród, is the opposite experience: you set type and print a sheet yourself.

Background

What you see today is not exactly what the painter left. A German inscription among the murals caught the eye of the occupation authorities, who had them cleaned and overpainted in 1942, and conservators came back in 1960, 1974, 1982, 1998-1999 and 2007. Damp was the constant enemy: around 1782 the window and the door onto the square were bricked up, and in the 1930s the room stored apples.

The date of the painting has moved as well. For decades it was credited to Erazm Lubomelski, who owned the house from 1573 until he died in 1586. In 2018 Urszula Gulbińska-Konopa and Łukasz Konopa identified the printed models, among them a book of 1596, which rules Erazm out; the murals most likely date from the early 17th century. Someone scratched the year 1679 into the wall, so the room was still in use by then.

The house is older than its cellar paintings. In the carriage passage, find the stone slab with the Zadora arms, the year 1540 and the letters IAN LVBOM, left by Jan Lubomelski’s rebuilding of a house first recorded in 1522. His family held it for over a century and sat on the city’s bench and council. Later owners ran from the Szerer family in 1661 to Lublin’s Jewish community in 1904.

The room returned to memory in 1901, when Maria Ronikierowa mentioned the paintings in her Lublin guidebook, and Józef Edward Dutkiewicz began the first conservation in 1937, only for the war to halt it. The cellar opened to paying visitors in 2012 and has been run by the Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre since February 2018.