Lublin Underground Route

What to expect

From the Market Square you would never guess it is there: the whole entrance is a short flight of steps down the right-hand side of the Crown Tribunal, the pale sand-coloured building mid-square. Below it, the Lublin Underground Route threads through close to 280 metres of merchant cellars on three levels, the deepest about ten metres under the cobbles. You surface elsewhere, on plac Po Farze, roughly 140 metres away as the crow flies.

Expect a guided walk, not a museum you browse at your own pace. Early on, a run of scale models shows the town spreading out from its early medieval settlement to the eighteenth century; according to Wikipedia, they were picked to follow the growth of the town walls. Then the cellars close in. Check the operator’s figures before you buy: 160 steps, passages as tight as 63 centimetres, and a doorway only 152 centimetres high that most adults have to stoop through.

The last ten minutes are loud and bright. Wikipedia describes the finale as trailing a virtual wanderer through the eighteenth-century town until the Great Fire of Lublin breaks out on 2 June 1719. The moving model that stages it owes its mechanics to the old mechanical theatres, with light and sound doing the rest. The operator warns that its strobe effects and sound can set off an epileptic seizure.

Worth it if you have already seen the Old Town at street level and want the layer beneath it. It suits children from about seven: five is the official minimum, but younger ones tend to tire or take fright in the half-dark. Give it a miss if you are claustrophobic, asthmatic or pregnant, have a heart condition, or are pushing a pram. There is no lift, no ramp and no toilet, and the air carries dust and mould.

Tips

• The guide speaks Polish. The standard 37 PLN ticket (30 PLN reduced) buys a Polish-language tour. For the same price you can choose the ticket type with a written script in English, German, Ukrainian, Russian, French, Spanish or Portuguese. Pick it in the online shop when you buy; it is a separate ticket. A tour led in English costs 50 PLN (45 PLN reduced).
• Book online, especially at weekends. Tickets are sold online and at the operator’s Information Centre, ul. Grodzka 21, from one shared allocation, so an empty online calendar means an empty counter too. The route’s own page says the Centre sells them in person on weekdays only.
• Entry times are fixed and seasonal. Every visit starts at a set time with a guide, and May to October brings more slots than the colder months. The operator calls its timetable the “basic entry times”, so check the live calendar in the online shop, especially from November to April. Sales open a month ahead and close one hour before each slot.
• Allow an hour. The tour itself lasts about 45 minutes. Add the ticket check five minutes before your slot and the walk back from plac Po Farze. Turn up late and your ticket counts as cancelled, with no refund.
• Pack a warm layer. The cellars stay at 8-12 degrees Celsius whatever the season. On a July afternoon that can be twenty degrees colder than the square above.
• Groups of 20 at most. Organised groups book by phone on +48 81 534 65 70, up to three months ahead, and bigger parties go down in batches 20 minutes apart. School groups pay 25 PLN each, and one teacher per ten pupils enters free.
• A costumed version exists. On selected dates the walk is led by Jadwiga Kołacznicka, a townswoman of old Lublin who tells her own story along the way. It costs 50 PLN instead of 37 PLN. The operator suggests it for children below school year four, for whom the standard tour is not recommended.
• The pass only pays from the third site. The 95 PLN pass (67 PLN reduced) is valid for 30 days at this route, the Grodzka Gate, the House of Words and Fortuna’s Cellar. It is sold in person only. Three standard tickets come to at least 97 PLN; for two sites, buy separately.

Getting there

Bus and trolleybus: use the Brama Krakowska stops. Stop 02 serves lines 04 and 39, stop 04 serves lines 01, 06, 17, 23, 156 and 160, and stops 01 and 03 sit on ul. Lubartowska. From the Lubartowska side, walk uphill to the Kraków Gate and carry straight on down ul. Bramowa. From stops 02 and 04, head past the car park towards the Archcathedral and through the Trinity Gate.

On foot: from plac Łokietka, go under the Kraków Gate and along ul. Bramowa to the Market Square, about three minutes. The steps down are on the right-hand side wall of the Tribunal.

By car: the nearest parking is the paid, unattended 24-hour car park on plac Katedralny, ul. Królewska 10, with two accessible bays. The Arkady car park between ul. Świętoduska and ul. Lubartowska is a daytime-only alternative. The Old Town is paved with rough granite setts, so wear shoes with a decent grip.

Nearby

• Fortuna’s Cellar is about 50 metres away on the same square and belongs to the same institution. It swaps scale models for seventeenth-century wall paintings, with a single guided entry a day at 30 PLN, so the two cellars fit into one afternoon.
• The Museum of the History of the City of Lublin fills the Kraków Gate and shows the town from a viewing level 36 metres up, for 10 PLN. Do the underground first and the view second.
• The Grodzka Gate - Teatr NN Centre runs this route. Its exhibition “Lublin. Memory of the Place” tells the story of the Jewish town that once lay beyond that gate and was destroyed.

Background

At the exit, look at the ground. The lit outline on plac Po Farze marks the foundations of St Michael’s, Lublin’s parish church, pulled down between 1846 and 1852; the foundations were exposed and lit in 2002. Legend says Duke Leszek the Black dreamt of the Archangel Michael under an oak here before defeating the Yotvingians, and founded the church in gratitude. A painted photo board by the exit lets you pose as the characters.

The other end has its own tale. The Tribunal began as the town hall and from 1578 housed the Crown Tribunal, the nobility’s appeal court; its cellars served as a wine store and a jail. The carved wooden devils down there point to the devil’s paw legend, about a widow cheated by bribed judges.

In between, the cellars were merchants’ storerooms in the sixteenth century, when Lublin’s fairs drew traders from across Europe. The route opened in June 2006, and some of its models were made by young people with disabilities as therapy. It is one of five sites run by the Grodzka Gate - Teatr NN Centre, a municipal cultural institution.