Kościuszko Manor House

What to expect

Plan the Kościuszko Manor House in Lublin as one stop on a garden walk, not as a museum in its own right. It has no street door. You pay at the UMCS Botanical Garden gate on ul. Willowa, walk past the plant collections and only then reach a wooden porch on four posts, inside 21 hectares of garden.

Do not come for an 18th-century interior. Leksykon Lublin, the city’s online heritage encyclopaedia, says plainly that none of the original fittings survived. The house itself went up in 1969-1972 on the old cellars, which reach almost ten metres beyond its west wall. What you see from the path is a single-storey timber house under a tall, broken-pitch Polish roof, with two small roof windows facing east.

Whatever stands in the rooms now was brought in later, and the university does not describe it. Znaczki Turystyczne, a Polish tourist-stamp site, lists period furniture and mementoes of Maria Skłodowska-Curie, Kościuszko and Lublin’s past. The garden’s web page on the Ramparts adds an 1893 Kościuszko portrait by Butkiewicz. The house is also hired out for conferences of 30 to 70 people and for civil weddings held indoors or outdoors, so a room may be in use.

The older layers of the site are outside. The Kościuszko Ramparts, an earthwork in the same garden, joined the monument register in October 2020. Digs in 2022-2024 found the foundations of a 16th-17th century fortified manor plus an 11th-13th century settlement and cemetery. Nobody has proved that Kościuszko designed the earthwork, and the garden itself says the evidence is missing.

Worth it if you are already giving the garden an afternoon, or if you are following Kościuszko’s trail through Poland. For a furnished gentry home, Dworek Wincentego Pola on the other side of town is the better choice and opens all year. Children under 14 must stay with an adult anywhere in the garden.

Tips

• The season ends on 31 October. The garden, and the manor with it, is open from 12 April to 31 October 2026. In winter the trip to Sławinek is pointless.
• Weekday visits stop at 14:00. From Tuesday to Friday the manor shuts at 14:00 while the garden keeps selling tickets well into the afternoon, so a Wednesday arrival at 15:00 gets you plants and no house. Saturday, Sunday and Monday run longer and vary by month: until 19:00 from May to July, until 16:00 in October.
• Last tickets an hour before the gate. Ticket sales end an hour before the exit gate closes, and the garden has moved both times during the 2026 season. Check the garden’s opening-hours page (in Polish) on the day.
• Bring a translation app. The garden says nothing about label languages inside the manor, and the visitor pages it publishes on hours, tickets, directions and rules are in Polish. Its web page on the Kościuszko Ramparts is the exception and carries a full English text.
• Budget 20-30 minutes inside, 2-3 hours for the garden. Both are our estimates, since no visit length is published for either. Guided garden tours of about 1.5 hours are offered only to organised groups of 8-14 or 15 and more, booked by phone Monday to Friday 7:00-15:00 or by e-mail at rezerwacje.botanik@mail.umcs.pl .
• The surcharge is small, the exception is not. A combined ticket costs 18 PLN against 16 PLN for the garden alone, or 15 PLN against 11 PLN reduced, and tickets are also sold online. Holders of a season pass or a UMCS alumni card pay 5 PLN for the manor - more than the surcharge a full-price visitor pays.
• Start the lime avenue at the porch. It runs 85 metres with 31 trees. Legend says Kościuszko planted them, but the garden’s 2008 dating gave 130-140 years, so they are about 150 today: spa-era trees, not his.
• House rules and access. No dogs except guide dogs, and no bicycles, scooters or roller skates. Photos for your own use are free; a portrait or wedding shoot with an hour inside the manor costs 300 PLN. The museum publishes no accessibility information - call before visiting.

Getting there

Bus: take line 2, 7, 37 or 47. Get off at Tarasowa 01 and carry on about 300 metres the way the bus was going, or at Bogdanówka 01 and walk about 300 metres back.

Avoid: lines 18, 20 and 30. They stop at Warszawska-Cerkiew 01 on al. Warszawska, which leaves about 1.5 km to walk to the gate.

Car: the ul. Willowa entrance has roughly 100 parking spaces.

Entrance: the only visitor gate and ticket office are on ul. Willowa, between house numbers 58 and 60. The old gate on al. Solidarności no longer opens, and the gates on ul. Sławinkowska are for staff.

Nearby

• Muzeum Wsi Lubelskiej open-air museum - about 400 metres away as the crow flies. Its entrance is at al. Warszawska 96 and the garden’s is on ul. Willowa, so the walk between gates is longer. Our profile gives it 2-3 hours on its own, so on a short day choose one of the two.
• UMCS Museum - the same university’s museum, in its Main Library on ul. Radziszewskiego, but closed until further notice while the library building is renovated. Once it reopens, it is the follow-up for anyone who came for the university rather than the Kościuszko family.
• Dworek Wincentego Pola - Lublin’s other manor museum, in Kalinowszczyzna, about 4.9 km away as the crow flies, open Tuesday to Saturday all year for 10 or 8 PLN.

Background

The house you see dates from 1969-1972. The university bought the house and what remained of the estate in 1950 for a future botanical garden, then lacked the money to use it. After the last tenants left in 1965 the house decayed into a total ruin within two years, and state conservation workshops rebuilt it over the surviving cellars. Visitors got the garden on 30 April 1974, the manor only in 2013.

The Kościuszko name reaches back two centuries further. A manor here is on record from 1720, and in 1755 Jan Nepomucen Kościuszko bought the estate. His nephew Tadeusz, later leader of the 1794 uprising, stayed in 1774-1775 and probably helped lay out the first park.

The lime avenue belongs to the next chapter, the spa. Paweł Wagner, owner from 1819, used iron-rich springs for baths, and by 1860 Sławinek had a full bathing establishment, linked to Lublin by horse-drawn omnibus, as Polish Wikipedia notes. It peaked in the early 1880s and lost to Nałęczów. Fire took the restaurant in 1896, Austrian troops wrecked the water intakes in 1915, and a deep well sunk nearby in 1960 killed the springs.