Lublin Underground Route

What to expect

The door is easy to miss: eleven steps down the right-hand side of the Crown Tribunal, the pale sandstone block standing in the middle of Lublin’s Market Square. Behind it the Lublin Underground Route runs some 280 metres of merchant cellars dug from the early sixteenth century onwards, joined into one passage across three levels. The lowest sits about ten metres below the cobbles. You surface somewhere else entirely, on plac po Farze.

The first stretch is a sequence of scale models tracing how Lublin grew from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. After that it narrows. The operator publishes the numbers, and they are worth knowing before you commit: 160 steps, passages down to 63 centimetres wide, and one doorway 152 centimetres high that everyone taller has to duck through.

The finish is a moving model of the Great Fire of Lublin of 2 June 1719, built in the manner of an old mechanical toy theatre. It was reconstructed from a votive painting in the Dominican church. The show runs about ten minutes with light, sound and movement. The operator itself warns that the strobe effects and the volume can trigger an epileptic seizure.

Best for anyone who has already walked the Old Town at street level and wants the other half of the story. Children cope from roughly seven upwards; five is the formal minimum, but younger ones tire or find the half-dark frightening. Skip it if you are claustrophobic, asthmatic, pregnant or pushing a pram. There is no lift, no ramp and no toilet on the route, and the air carries dust and mould.

Tips

• The tour is in Polish. The standard 37 PLN ticket (30 PLN reduced) buys a Polish-language guided walk. If you need English, German, Ukrainian, Russian, French, Spanish or Portuguese, book the separate ticket type that comes with a written translation - it costs the same 37/30 PLN, but you have to select it when buying, not ask for it at the door. A guide speaking a foreign language is a third option and costs 50 PLN (45 PLN reduced).
• One ticket pool, two counters. Tickets sell through the operator’s online shop and at its Information Centre, ul. Grodzka 21, but from the same allocation. If the website shows no slot, walking to Grodzka 21 will not find you one. Check the Centre’s own opening hours before you set out - the operator’s official pages give conflicting times.
• 14:00 runs every day of the year. The 14:00 entry goes daily, all year round. On weekdays it is joined by 12:00 in July and August and by 16:00 from May to October. At weekends there is a 12:00 entry alongside 14:00, with 16:00 and 17:00 added from May to October. Buy up to a month ahead and no later than one hour before the entry time.
• Allow an hour door to door. The walk itself takes about 45 minutes, plus the ticket check five minutes before your slot and the way back from plac po Farze. Arriving late counts as cancelling, with no refund.
• Bring a layer. The cellars hold 8-12 degrees Celsius all year. In July that is a twenty-degree drop from the square above.
• Groups cap at 20. Organised groups book by phone on +48 81 534 65 70 up to three months ahead; larger parties are split and sent down at 20-minute intervals. School groups pay 25 PLN a head, with one adult free per ten pupils.
• The staged version costs more. On selected dates the operator runs the walk as a performance, led by a townswoman character with a reason to be living underground; its tariff is 50 PLN instead of 37 PLN. The operator recommends it for children below school year four, who are steered away from the standard tour.
• The pass pays off from the third site. The 95 PLN combined ticket (67 PLN reduced) covers this route plus the Grodzka Gate exhibition, the House of Words and Fortuna’s Cellar for 30 days, but it is sold in person only. For two sites, separate tickets are cheaper.

Getting there

Bus and trolleybus: the nearest stops are Brama Krakowska 02 (lines 04 and 39) and Brama Krakowska 04 (01, 06, 17, 23, 156, 160), with Brama Krakowska 01 and 03 on ul. Lubartowska. From stops 01 and 03 on Lubartowska, walk uphill to the Kraków Gate and straight on along ul. Bramowa. From stops 02 and 04 the way runs past the car park towards the Archcathedral and on through the Trinity Gate.

On foot: from plac Łokietka through the Kraków Gate and along ul. Bramowa, about three minutes. Coming from the main railway station, take any of the bus or trolleybus lines above to the Brama Krakowska stops rather than walking the whole way. The entrance is on the right-hand side wall of the Crown Tribunal, down a short flight of steps.

By car: the closest car park is the paid, unattended 24-hour lot on plac Katedralny at ul. Królewska 10, which has two accessible bays. The alternative is the Arkady car park between ul. Świętoduska and ul. Lubartowska, open 08:00-18:00. Old Town paving is unpolished granite setts, so leave the smooth soles at the hotel.

Nearby

• Fortuna’s Cellar sits a few dozen metres away on the same square, run by the same institution: seventeenth-century wall paintings instead of models, one guided entry a day at 12:00, 30 PLN. Both cellars fit comfortably into one afternoon.
• The Museum of the History of the City of Lublin occupies the Kraków Gate and shows the same town from above, including a panorama 36 metres up, for 10 PLN. Underground first, then the view, works better than the other way round.
• The Grodzka Gate - Teatr NN Centre is the operator of this route, and its “Lublin. Memory of the Place” exhibition covers the Jewish quarter that stood on the far side of that gate and no longer exists.

Background

The route opened in June 2006, but its raw material is centuries older. In the sixteenth century, Lublin’s commercial peak, these cellars were merchant warehouses; a dozen or so were later linked by tunnels into a single passage.

Its line is deliberate. It begins under the old town hall, the seat of secular power. It ends on the square where the church of St Michael stood until the nineteenth century, the centre of the town’s religious life. Each end carries one of Lublin’s two best-known legends: the devil’s paw and the dream of Leszek the Black.

Some of the models charting the town’s growth were built by young people with disabilities as therapeutic work. The route is now one of five sites run by the Grodzka Gate - Teatr NN Centre, a municipal cultural institution of the City of Lublin.