Kościuszko Manor House

What to expect

The Kościuszko Manor House has no street door of its own. You buy a ticket at the UMCS Botanical Garden gate on ul. Willowa, walk in past the plant collections, and only then reach a wooden porch on four posts. Treat it as one stop inside a 21-hectare garden, not as a museum you travel across Lublin for.

The building is single-storey, rectangular, under a high broken Polish roof with two dormers on the east side. It is a reconstruction built in 1969-1972 on the original cellars, which run almost ten metres further west than the house standing today. Leksykon Lublin, the city’s heritage encyclopaedia, states plainly that nothing of the original interior fittings survived.

The university publishes no description of what is on display. The Polish tourist-stamp portal Znaczki Turystyczne describes the rooms as period furniture and mementoes of Maria Skłodowska-Curie, Tadeusz Kościuszko and the history of Lublin. UMCS mentions in passing that the manor’s collection holds an 1893 portrait of Kościuszko by Butkiewicz. The house is also rented out for conferences and civil weddings for 30 to 70 guests, so a room may be closed when you arrive.

Best for anyone already spending an afternoon in the garden, and for visitors following Kościuszko’s Lublin traces. The second of those traces is outside: the Kościuszko Ramparts, earthworks in the same garden, listed as a monument in October 2020. Excavations there in 2022-2024 uncovered the foundations of a 16th-17th century fortified manor plus a settlement and cemetery from the 11th-13th centuries.

If you want a furnished gentry interior rather than a setting and a story, Dworek Wincentego Pola delivers that and stays open all year. Children under 14 may enter the garden only with an adult.

Tips

• Seasonal, not year-round. The garden and the manor open from 12 April to 31 October 2026. Outside those dates the trip to Sławinek is wasted.
• The day of the week decides your visit. Tuesday to Friday the manor is open only 10:00-14:00, while on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays from May to July it stays open until 19:00. Come at a weekend if you want the manor and the garden in one go.
• English on site is not guaranteed. The garden publishes nothing about label languages inside the manor, and its own visitor pages exist only in Polish. The outdoor Kościuszko Ramparts display is the one part with a full English text.
• Allow 20-30 minutes inside, 2-3 hours for the garden. The 20-30 minutes is our estimate, since no visit duration is published. A guided garden tour runs about 1.5 hours and must be booked by phone Monday to Friday, 7:00-15:00.
• The surcharge is small, the exception is not. A combined ticket is 18 PLN against 16 PLN for the garden alone, or 15 PLN against 11 PLN reduced. Season-pass and UMCS alumni-card holders pay 5 PLN for the manor, which is more than a full-price visitor’s surcharge.
• The ticket office shuts before the garden does. Tickets are sold until 17:30 and the exit gate closes at 18:30. Arrive late on a June evening and you can still buy entry yet miss the manor.
• Walk the lime avenue from the porch. It is 85 metres long and lined with 31 trees. Local legend credits Kościuszko with planting them, but the garden’s own 2008 dating put them at 130-140 years, which makes them about 150 today - still the spa era, not Kościuszko’s time.
• Accessibility: call first. The museum publishes no accessibility information - call before visiting.
• What you cannot bring in. No dogs except guide dogs, no bicycles, scooters or roller skates. Non-commercial photography is free; a booked portrait or wedding session including an hour inside the manor costs 300 PLN.

Getting there

Bus: lines 2, 7, 37 and 47 get you closest. From the Tarasowa 01 stop walk about 300 metres onwards in the direction of travel; from Bogdanówka 01 walk about 300 metres back.

Common mistake: lines 18, 20 and 30 drop you at Warszawska-Cerkiew 01 on al. Warszawska, about 1.5 km short of the entrance.

Car: roughly 100 parking spaces sit at the ul. Willowa entrance.

Entrance: the ticket office and the visitor gate are on ul. Willowa between house numbers 58 and 60. The old entrance from al. Solidarności is closed and the ul. Sławinkowska gates are staff-only.

Nearby

• Muzeum Wsi Lubelskiej open-air museum - about 1.5 km away (a 20-minute walk, or one bus stop). It needs three hours of its own, so plan a full day or pick one of the two.
• UMCS Museum - the same university, a different address in the main library on ul. Radziszewskiego. The obvious follow-up if the university, not the Kościuszko family, is what brought you here.
• Dworek Wincentego Pola - Lublin’s other manor museum, in Kalinowszczyzna, open Tuesday to Saturday all year, 10 and 8 PLN.

Background

The manor on the Sławinek farmstead first appears in writing in 1720. In 1755 the estate was bought by Jan Nepomucen Kościuszko, starosta of Krzemieniec and uncle of Tadeusz Kościuszko, the future leader of the 1794 uprising. Tadeusz stayed here in 1774-1775 and probably helped his uncle lay out the park.

From 1819 the owner Paweł Wagner exploited iron-bearing mineral springs on the grounds, and by 1860 Sławinek had a full bathing establishment that drew patients from across the Congress Kingdom. It peaked in the early 1880s, then lost out to Nałęczów. The restaurant burned in 1896, Austrian troops wrecked the water intakes in 1915, and the springs disappeared in 1960 after a deep well was sunk nearby.

UMCS bought the remnant estate in 1950 for a planned botanical garden. The last tenants moved out in 1965, the house was a ruin by 1967, and Lublin’s monument conservation workshops rebuilt it in 1969-1972. The garden opened to the public on 30 April 1974; the manor itself followed only in 2013.