Museum of the Eastern Lands of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

What to expect

Read this one as trip planning, not as a visit. The Museum of Eastern Lands of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is a building site on Lublin’s main square, and it has never admitted a visitor. Its own website says so in a single phrase in the page header: under renovation. The Lubomirski Palace on plac Litewski has been behind a construction fence since autumn 2024, and there is no visitor entrance of any kind.

If you are wondering what “Kresy” means: these are the eastern lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, today in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Poland lost them in 1945, and the population was resettled westwards. The museum is being built out of what those families kept in their wardrobes. It is built, too, out of recordings of what they remember.

The permanent exhibition, “A Journey Through the Kresy”, will fill 2,500 square metres on basement level -2, the ground floor and the first floor. It is to cover 1,000 years of the region’s history, from the 10th century to the present, through more than 3,000 objects. The narrative frame is a real journey: the geographer Ludomir Sawicki’s 1926 trip through the Vilnius region, Polesie, Volhynia and Podolia. Both palace towers are to be opened to the public.

The scale of the works explains the delay. Two new underground levels are being dug to 9 metres below the present ground floor. That will take the usable area from roughly 3,000 to about 5,000 square metres. The whole rebuild is funded by Poland’s Ministry of Culture; the museum gives the total value of the task as 171,494,054 PLN.

Then archaeologists found walls older than the palace, coins from the 15th century and a tunnel some 40 metres long running under the square. The deadline moved by a year.

Best for two readers: anyone planning a Lublin trip for 2027 or later, and descendants of Kresy families thinking about donating a keepsake. If you want a museum in Lublin this weekend, this is not it. From the pavement you get a classicist facade behind a fence, and that is the whole experience.

Tips

• Do not plan a visit before 2027. The works were meant to finish at the end of 2026; the deadline was extended by a year after the archaeological finds, and no opening date has been announced. Check the branch’s own page before you book flights, not a guidebook.
• Write to the branch, not the switchboard. The branch has its own lines, +48 81 537 96 29 and +48 665 011 819, and its own address, mzwdr@mnwl.pl . The number listed for Zamkowa 9 reaches the whole National Museum and will only pass you on.
• Donating a family keepsake uses a third contact. The “Saved from the Kresy” drive collects photographs, documents, clothing and household objects, and records oral histories; appointments go through +48 726 022 100 or zbiorka@mnwl.pl . Objects are handed over as a gift, and the rules are downloadable from the museum’s site. While the seat is being rebuilt, post goes to a temporary address: ul. Kapucyńska 1A, 20-009 Lublin.
• June is the one week the institution is visible. The branch co-runs the International Renaissance Festival with the Belriguardo Foundation - 12 to 14 June in 2026, with a costumed procession and Italian flag-throwers crossing plac Litewski and the Old Town. Most of the programme was free; some 14 June items were ticketed.
• English is an open question. Nothing is published about label languages, audio guides or English-language tours in the future museum. If that decides your trip, ask the branch directly rather than assuming a new national-museum project will be bilingual.
• Teachers and genealogists already have the useful part. The ziemiewschodnie.pl portal carries 3D models of objects, an interactive panorama of the 1018 battle on the Bug, free e-publications and ready-made lesson plans - more than a half-finished building can give you.
• No hours, no prices, no booking. None of them are published for this branch, and do not assume the Lublin Castle combined ticket will cover it; admission terms will be announced separately.
• Accessibility: ask before you come. The rebuild is designed to remove barriers for visitors with disabilities, but the museum publishes no accessibility information for the finished building yet - call before visiting.

Getting there

The Lubomirski Palace closes the western side of plac Litewski, on Krakowskie Przedmieście. This is the dead centre of Lublin, on the pedestrian axis between the railway-station end of town and the Old Town, so you will walk past it whether or not you mean to.

• On foot: about 400 m, five minutes, from the Krakow Gate along Krakowskie Przedmieście. Around 15 minutes from Lublin Castle.
• Bus and trolleybus: the stop is Plac Litewski on Krakowskie Przedmieście, served by dozens of bus lines and by trolleybuses including 150, 155 and 158. Timetables at zdtm.lublin.eu.
• By car: there is no museum car park and there will not be one during the works; the streets around the square are a paid parking zone.
• At the door: expect hoardings along the frontage and a narrowed pavement. There is no entrance and no viewing point for the site.

Nearby

If you came here expecting a museum, the shortest substitute is five minutes away: the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin in the Krakow Gate tells the story of the city whose 1569 union with Lithuania created the subject this museum will cover. For a full afternoon, walk up to the castle and the National Museum in Lublin , the parent institution of this branch and the address where its staff actually work. The third link is the bleak one: the Museum of the Catholic University of Lublin is also shut for renovation, so two of the city’s museums are waiting to reopen at the same time.

Background

The palace is older than the museum by four centuries. Its history goes back to the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. Tylman van Gameren rebuilt it for the Lubomirskis at the end of the 17th century, preparing his design in 1693. The classicist shape that stands today comes from a rebuild in the first half of the 19th century, to Henryk Marconi’s design. In 1918 the first government of independent Poland sat in this building.

After the Second World War the palace went to Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, which housed its political science faculty here and sold the building in 2017 for 10.7 million PLN. The Ministry of Culture had decided to create the museum the year before, in 2016. The rebuild is designed by the Warsaw practice WXCA, with exhibition design by Ralph Appelbaum Associates. The Lublin contractor Lubren has been on site since September 2024. The museum’s own management calls it the largest renovation the palace has had in 200 years.