Museum of the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University

What to expect

Do not plan a visit here in 2026. The Museum of UMCS has no exhibition space at the moment. Its hall sits inside the university’s Main Library at ul. Radziszewskiego 11, the building is being rebuilt, and the staff have moved to a temporary office at ul. J. Sowińskiego 12. Lublin’s city portal lists the museum under the plain heading “temporarily closed”. Nobody publishes a reopening date - not the university, not the city.

What is shut is a university museum of the historical kind, one half of the unit called Archiwum i Muzeum UMCS. It keeps the everyday material of an academic institution: ceremonial insignia and gowns, decorations, diplomas, medals and cups, posters and playbills, teaching and laboratory equipment, and press and photographic records of the campus. A separate strand is contemporary art on paper - drawings, prints and bookplates. By 1989 the holdings had passed 2,000 objects and 3,500 photographs.

Whether a permanent display exists at all is disputed. Polish Wikipedia describes one in the library, topped up with temporary shows. The catalogue of the Polish association of university museums says the opposite: no permanent display, only temporary exhibitions, for lack of room. The university settles nothing, because three of the four pages in its museum section - “How to use”, “Collections” and “List of exhibitions” - are blank, checked on 15 September 2026.

The exhibitions themselves have left the building. “Ladies and Hussars - 200 Years on Polish Stages”, seven panels on two centuries of Aleksander Fredro’s comedy with costumes and playbills lent by an amateur theatre company, stood through July and August 2026 in the Stołówka Akademicka “Trójka”, a student canteen, after opening in the Main Library in December 2025. From 29 April 2026 the coworking corner of the same canteen showed “Pasja”, the results of a watercolour workshop run at the Kościuszko Manor House.

Best for researchers working on the university’s own past, for UMCS alumni, and for anyone who follows Polish university museums professionally. If you have two days in Lublin, this address gives you nothing to enter - go to Labirynt Gallery instead.

Tips

• Phone before anything else. The number +48 81 537 58 31 and the address muzeum@mail.umcs.pl are the only working channel. The web pages that should answer your questions are empty, so nothing can be checked online.
• Use the temporary address. Staff work at ul. J. Sowińskiego 12, not in the Main Library. Turn up at the old address and you will find a building site.
• Office hours are not visiting hours. A notice of 24 June 2026 gives the summer pattern: Monday to Thursday 7:15-15:15, Friday 7:15-13:15, with the reading room shut for the whole of August. That is a seasonal announcement - confirm by phone before you set out, and expect nothing to look at when you arrive.
• There is no price list. The museum has never published one. The city portal says admission to the temporary shows in the Main Library was free during library hours; with the library closed, that no longer applies.
• Look for the panels, not the building. The 2026 exhibitions travelled to the “Trójka” academic canteen and its coworking space. Check the news feed of Archiwum i Muzeum UMCS for the current location before you plot a route.
• Skip the museum across the street. The Museum of the Catholic University of Lublin is 250 m away and also closed for renovation. Doing both in one walk is a wasted afternoon.
• Donate rather than visit. On 14 April 2026 the unit appealed for photographs, documents, letters and objects connected with the university, and asked faculties to offer equipment before scrapping it. If you graduated from UMCS, that is the useful thing to do with this address in 2026.
• Archive research is a separate trip. The UMCS Archive receives readers Monday to Friday 9:00-14:00, by prior telephone arrangement only, on +48 81 537 58 26. Allow 20-30 minutes for a panel exhibition if you track one down; the archive is a half-day.
• Accessibility. The museum publishes no accessibility information - call before visiting.

Getting there

Bus and trolleybus: the stops UMCS 01 (about 140 m from the library) and UMCS 02 (about 210 m) are the closest. OpenStreetMap data from September 2026 shows buses 12, 26, 31 and 303, night service N2 and trolleybus 150 calling here. Timetables change when the academic year starts, so check the ZDiTM journey planner. Lublin has no trams.

On foot: about 1.5 km west of plac Litewski, roughly 20 minutes. From the main KUL building on Aleje Racławickie it is under 300 m.

By car: the museum publishes nothing about parking, and the yards beside the library serve university traffic. With the hall closed there is no reason to try - public transport drops you at the temporary office door.

Nearby

Across Aleje Racławickie, some 250 m away, stands the Museum of the Catholic University of Lublin , the city’s other university museum. Treat it as a warning rather than a suggestion: it is closed for its own renovation and showing its collection elsewhere, exactly like this one.

If you want a university venue you can actually walk into, that is the Kościuszko Manor House in the UMCS Botanical Garden. It is about 2 km away in a straight line - half an hour on foot or a short bus ride, not the “few minutes’ walk” that campus descriptions suggest.

The nearest open door is the Labirynt Gallery at ul. Popiełuszki 5, some 700 m north: contemporary art, free admission, open Tuesday to Sunday 12:00-19:00.

Background

The idea surfaced in Lublin in the 1970s. On 30 April 1976 the rectors’ college backed a proposal from doc. dr Kazimierz Sand, and on 4 June it appointed a working group chaired by doc. dr hab. Józef Szymański. Szymański wanted a research-grade institution on the model of the Jagiellonian University Museum in Kraków, and argued that the university’s archive and museum had to be built together so that the sources would not be scattered.

The museum opened on 1 October 1980 in the library on what was then ul. Nowotki, now Radziszewskiego 11. The university’s own account says it then opened daily 10:00-15:00 except Sundays, Mondays and public holidays - hours on that scale were never announced again. A rector’s ordinance of 1 December 1980 placed it formally inside a history and library science department; it became an independent unit, Archiwum i Muzeum UMCS, in 1999. It has belonged to the Polish association of university museums since 2016, and Lublin hosted the association’s national conference on 23-25 October 2024.