Pod Zegarem Martyrdom Museum

What to expect

The Under the Clock Museum in Lublin is a cellar under a working university. The block at Uniwersytecka 1 now holds faculties of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, and students cross the courtyard above the cells every weekday. The clock on the facade that gave the address its name still carries its 1930s mechanism. Downstairs, the Gestapo detention block of twelve cells is left where it was.

You see the corridor and the cells, and nothing else; the upper floors are not part of the visit. Most cells measured 340 by 279 by 238 cm and one of the dark cells was 75 cm wide. Windows were boarded inside and banked with earth outside, cell doors were replaced by bars, every light fitting was stripped out, and two bulbs in the corridor were the only light. The heating was there and was switched off.

Two things carry the visit. The first is the inscriptions prisoners scratched into the plaster with fingernails and scraps of wire, recovered from under layers of paint during the 2015-2017 works and conserved in place. The second is the screens standing inside the cells, which show previously unseen photographs and read out the prisoners’ memoirs and poems. One cell and one dark cell were restored to their wartime state.

The numbers behind the rooms are plain. Interrogations began around 9:00, the Gestapo questioned about 50 people a day, and stays ran from a single day to several months. An estimated 200 people were killed in the building between 1942 and 1944. Four cells of the original block are still held by the army and closed to the public.

Best for adults and teenagers from about 14, and close to essential if Majdanek is on your itinerary. Do not bring small children; nothing here is softened for them. If you came for interwar Lublin’s architecture, note that the museum is the cellar only.

Tips

• Bring cash, and no, it is not free. The desk takes cash only, by the museum’s own instruction. Admission is 10 PLN full price and 8 PLN reduced, although the city portal lublin.eu and several tourist sites still tell you entry is free.
• Ignore the museum’s English page, and ask about English before you rely on it. That page still shows 9.00-16.00 opening, free entry and a COVID mask notice (checked 14 September 2026); the Polish branch page is the operational one, Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00-17:00, closed Sunday and Monday. It also offers guided tours in English booked in advance, while nothing on the site states the language of the labels. Phone +48 81 533 36 78 or write to zegar@mnwl.pl and ask; assume Polish otherwise.
• Free days change every month. The branch lists the current month’s dates on its page . Every branch of the National Museum in Lublin sets its own dates, so read this branch’s page rather than the castle’s.
• Allow 45 to 60 minutes. The museum publishes no visiting time. Walking the cellar takes a quarter of an hour; the screens and the inscribed walls hold people considerably longer.
• The second exhibition is round the corner. The branch also runs “Girls in KL Ravensbruck” at ul. Radziszewskiego 4, some 100 m away, on the 74 young Polish women subjected to pseudo-medical experiments in the camp. Ask at the desk whether it is open and add half an hour.
• Order your day: here first, Majdanek second. Many of the camp’s prisoners were interrogated in this cellar on the way there. An hour underground changes how the camp reads.
• Photography is for yourself only. Private use, no publication rights, no flash, no additional lighting, no tripods.
• Accessibility: call first. The museum publishes no accessibility information and the exhibition is below ground. The institution’s “Museum without barriers” statement covers the castle hill and says nothing about this building.

Getting there

Uniwersytecka 1 sits in the Srodmiescie district, between the western end of Krakowskie Przedmiescie and the university campus. The entrance is off the street and leads straight down to the cellars.

• On foot: about 12 minutes from plac Litewski, about 20 from the Krakow Gate, about 25 from the castle hill. Walking is the sensible option; the whole route runs through the centre.
• Bus and trolleybus: the nearest stops are Ogrod Saski 03 (about 300 m) and KUL 02 (about 350 m) on Krakowskie Przedmiescie, then Krakowskie Przedmiescie 02 and UMCS 01. Between them they are served by a dozen-odd city bus and trolleybus lines.
• By car: the museum publishes nothing about parking. Leave the car outside the central streets and walk in.
• The second site: ul. Radziszewskiego 4 is the next street west, roughly 100 m, a two-minute walk.

Nearby

The obvious companion is Lublin Castle and the National Museum in Lublin , the parent institution and the prison from which detainees were driven here for questioning; admission 20 PLN and about 2.5 hours well spent.

The story continues at the State Museum at Majdanek on the city’s southern edge - free entry, three hours, the camp that some of the people interrogated in this cellar ended up in. For the pre-war city the occupation erased, go to the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin in the Krakow Gate. It keeps the same branch hours and the same ticket price in an entirely different register.

Background

The building went up for the regional land office in 1930 and was a statement of modernity: three storeys over cellars, central heating, lifts, some 250 officials at work. That modernity decided its fate. A reinforced-concrete block could be sealed off from the street in a way no old tenement could, which is why the Gestapo took it in January 1940 rather than a period building.

The last prisoners were tortured here on 20 July 1944 and the Germans left two days later. In September 1944 the NKVD, and after it the Polish communist security service, reopened the same cells until 1946; the building then passed to the army.

The branch was founded on 23 September 1979 by the club of former political prisoners of the castle and Under the Clock. It gained the Radziszewskiego space in 1991 and reopened in December 2017, after the works that recovered the inscriptions.

English-language readers may know the address without knowing it: James A. Michener used Under the Clock as a location in his novel “Poland”.