Józef Czechowicz Literary Museum

What to expect

Be honest with yourself before you buy the ticket: this is a museum of paper, in Polish, about a poet almost nobody outside Poland has read. Józef Czechowicz was the leading avant-garde poet of interwar Lublin, killed here on 9 September 1939 by a German bomb while sitting in a barber’s shop about a kilometre away. The Czechowicz literary museum in Lublin keeps what survived him, and the permanent display, Józef Czechowicz (1903-1939), gathers documents, photographs, manuscripts and the slim volumes published in his lifetime. It is a serious literary archive, not a visitor attraction.

The strongest thing in the rooms is how little of him survived. His Warsaw flat, left behind in September 1939, was stripped of anything of value, though Wacław Mrozowski saved the manuscripts and notebooks. What remains is domestic and very small: two little bells brought back from France. There are also a tablecloth and napkins embroidered with his initials by his sister Katarzyna Głuszewska, and a teaspoon engraved with his father’s.

The archive behind the display is far larger. It holds autograph manuscripts, letters, diary fragments, school certificates, his diploma from the Institute of Special Education in Warsaw and some fifty inscribed volumes from his own library. It also keeps papers of other writers of the Lublin region: Franciszka Arnsztajnowa, Józef Łobodowski, Anna Kamieńska, Jan Pocek. Add letters and poetry manuscripts by Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Julian Tuwim and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, plus a reference library of roughly ten thousand volumes.

So: go if you read Polish, or if you are already interested in Central European modernism and are willing to work from the objects alone. The museum publishes nothing about English labels, and its free mobile guide to the display is in Polish only. If you are in Lublin for two days and do not read Polish, the Castle and the Kraków Gate will give you more per hour than this house will.

Tips

• When to go: Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00-17:00 (10 AM to 5 PM), closed Sundays and Mondays. School groups arrive around midday and one group fills the house, so Saturday morning is the calmest slot available.
• How long to allow: 45 minutes for the permanent display. An hour if you stop at the manuscripts.
• Language: The one guide the museum offers is a free, downloadable interactive mobile guide to the permanent exhibition , and it is in Polish only; the site says nothing about English labels or English-speaking staff. Photograph the captions and translate them on your phone, or book a tour and ask about language first. A guided tour costs 70 PLN plus admission for each participant. Museum lessons are 80 PLN plus a 7 PLN lesson ticket, workshops 100 PLN plus a 10 PLN ticket. All are booked on +48 81 532 30 90.
• The 50 PLN combined ticket: The “Zamek Lubelski + Oddziały” ticket (50 PLN, 40 PLN reduced) covers the Castle and its branches, including this one. It is sold only at the Castle box office, so if you want both, buy it at the Castle first.
• The free day moves: Each month the branch names one weekday with free admission and posts it on its page . Check the branch’s current notice rather than assuming a fixed day.
• Don’t miss: The two small bells brought back from France. The museum describes one of them, brought over in 1932, as a talisman of the poet; together with the tablecloth and the teaspoon this is almost everything of his that survived the war.
• Photography: Private use only, with no right of publication. Flash, extra lighting and tripods are all forbidden.
• Ignore the museum’s English page: It still advertises 6 PLN tickets, free Wednesdays and summer hours from Tuesday to Sunday. Only the Polish pages of this branch are current.

Getting there

On foot: Złota runs off the Old Town Market Square. It is a two-minute walk from the Grodzka Gate and about five minutes from the Kraków Gate, the main entrance to the Old Town from Krakowskie Przedmieście.

Bus: The branch publishes no directions of its own. The nearest stop the National Museum names is Muzeum Narodowe - Zamek on plac Zamkowy. Buses stopping there include 2, 5, 6, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 34, 39, 52, 57, 150 and 301, plus the Zielona line, and from there it is roughly 300 m through the Grodzka Gate. Coming from Lublin Główny railway station, use the same stop you would use for the Castle.

By car: There is no parking at the museum and no vehicle access to the door. The nearest public option is the paid car park on plac Zamkowy. Charges apply Monday to Friday 08:00-18:00; outside those hours and at weekends it is free. It is often unavailable because of concerts and other events held on the square.

The museum publishes no accessibility information - call before visiting.

Nearby

This is a branch of the same institution as Lublin Castle and the National Museum , 300 m away, and the Castle box office is where the combined ticket for both is sold. The Museum of the History of the City of Lublin in the Kraków Gate takes about half an hour. It shows the city Czechowicz wrote his best-known poem about, which makes it the natural companion visit. For the other half of the literary thread, the Wincenty Pol Manor House is the National Museum’s second literary branch and sheltered the Czechowicz collection from 1999 to 2002.

Background

Practically nothing in this house was bought. The collection came out of private drawers: four friends of the poet who were still alive in the late 1950s - Feliks Araszkiewicz, Konrad Bielski, Wacław Gralewski and Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski - handed over their own keepsakes and inscribed copies once Stanisław Fita and Lech Ludorowski had argued in a 1957 article, Ocalmy pamięć wielkich, for museums of the region’s writers. Tadeusz Kłak spent 1963 to 1965 turning those donations into the first exhibition script. The poet Józef Zięba then ran the place for twenty-one years.

The building was a gift too, and it took three addresses to get here. Both of the museum’s openings fell on 9 September, the date Czechowicz was killed in 1939: the first in 1968 on Narutowicza street, where it stayed for almost thirty years, the second in 2002 at Złota 3, a townhouse the Riabinin family of Lublin historians and archivists gave to the city. The gap between them is the part nobody advertises - the Narutowicza premises were lost in 1999 and the collection sat out three years as a lodger in the Wincenty Pol Manor House.