The Connector (Łącznica)

What to expect

Read the language line first: the tour at Łącznica runs in Polish only, with no audio guide and no printed translation. If that is a wall, the Lublin Underground Route five minutes away sells a written translation in seven languages. If it is not, the guide will show you the objects whatever you follow.

Łącznica - “the switchboard” - is the newest of the six venues run by the Grodzka Gate - NN Theatre Centre, opened on 14 May 2026. It occupies two connected rooms in the rear wing of a townhouse at ul. Królewska 17, reached by ten steps down from the street under a sign bearing the name. Inside stand about 200 objects: landline telephones from a century of designs, telephone exchanges, switchboards and the equipment that hung in every Polish office until the 1990s. Exhibits sit at different heights because the space is genuinely small - a collector’s workshop rather than a museum floor.

The collection belongs to Henryk Świerszcz, once an employee of the District Workshops of Post and Telecommunications (Okręgowe Warsztaty Poczty i Telekomunikacji) in Lublin, who assembled it over several decades in his garage from colleagues, flea markets and online auctions. At the opening the collection was reported to include roughly 20 switchboards alongside military field telephones, teleprinters and telephone booths. The sheet-metal sets are over a hundred years old; post-war handsets were moulded from ebonite and plastic.

Ask the guide for the CB-50. It is a switchboard of 1969, about the size of an upright piano, built to handle up to 50 lines. It took its last call in the late 1980s in the main library of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, where Świerszcz found it. He says most of the equipment on show still works.

Best for anyone who grew up dialling a rotary phone, and for readers of industrial and technology history. Children are admitted at any age, but nothing here is hands-on, so an hour holds them only if the guide is good. Allow 60 minutes and no more - this is a stop, not an afternoon.

Tips

• One entry a day, weekdays only. Individual visitors go in Monday to Friday at 13:00. There is no second slot and no fallback, and at weekends the only way in is as a pre-booked group.
• Twelve seats is the entire daily capacity. Groups are capped at 12 people, so book ahead at bilety.teatrnn.pl. In person, tickets are sold at the Centre’s Information Point, ul. Grodzka 21, and at the Tourist Inspiration Centre, ul. Jezuicka 1/3.
• The Centre’s multi-site pass does not cover this. The 95 PLN pass (67 PLN reduced) buys the Grodzka Gate, the House of Words, the Underground Route and Fortuna’s Cellar. Łącznica is not on that list, so you pay a separate 20 PLN (10 PLN reduced) here even if you hold the pass.
• There is no free day. Unlike most Lublin museums, Łącznica publishes no monthly free-admission date. Free entry is entitlement-based only - assistants of visitors with disabilities, holders of the Polish “Family 3+” card, Honorary Citizens of Lublin.
• Build the afternoon around 13:00. Fortuna’s Cellar admits at 12:00 and the Underground Route at 14:00, so you can pair Łącznica with one of them, not both. The 14:00 pairing means walking straight from one door to the other.
• Groups phone, they do not click. Organised groups are taken outside the standard hour and are booked only by telephone on +48 81 532 58 67 or by e-mail to bilety@tnn.lublin.pl . No group rate is published; agree it when you book.
• Those ten steps are the whole accessibility story. There is no lift and no ramp at the entrance, though once inside there are no thresholds at all and the lighting is soft and artificial. Blind and partially sighted visitors can use the space freely, ideally with an assistant or a guide dog; the Centre provides no sign-language interpreter at any of its sites.
• Dogs are welcome. The Centre states plainly that pets are accepted on the exhibition - worth knowing if you are travelling with one.

Getting there

Bus: stops Brama Krakowska 01, 02 and 04, served by lines 5, 6, 17, 22, 24, 25, 29, 39, 52, 156, 160, 950 and the night lines N1 and N2. Stops 02 and 04 are on the same side of the street as Łącznica; from stop 01 by the Kraków Gate you cross the road first.

On foot: from the Kraków Gate at the end of Krakowskie Przedmieście, walk towards the Archcathedral and then a few minutes along ul. Królewska - five minutes in all from the Old Town’s main entrance. Do not look for a museum front door: the entrance is in the rear wing, ten steps below street level, under the “Łącznica” sign.

By car: the nearest car park is in front of the Archcathedral, entered from ul. Królewska - open around the clock, paid 24 hours a day seven days a week, unguarded, with two accessible bays. A second one on ul. Żmigród is paid Monday to Friday 08:00-17:00 and has one accessible bay.

Nearby

Same address, same courtyard: the House of Words and its Chamber of Printing shares ul. Królewska 17 with Łącznica. That makes it the obvious pairing - two analogue technologies without walking anywhere, and it stays open all day around the fixed 13:00 slot.

The Grodzka Gate - NN Theatre Centre at ul. Grodzka 21 is the parent institution and the counter where tickets and the four-site pass are sold. For a second guided visit the same afternoon, the Lublin Underground Route admits at 14:00 - workable only if you leave here promptly. Across the street at ul. Królewska 10 stands the Trinity Tower, the highest viewpoint in Lublin.

Background

Łącznica is the sixth site in the Centre’s visiting programme and by far the newest, opened on 14 May 2026. The idea is older. Świerszcz was talking about a Lublin museum of switchboards and old telephones as early as 2019, when the collection was still in a garage; he had been hooked on the subject since technical school. At the opening the Centre’s director, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, framed the exhibition as a record of analogue communication, a world that vanished abruptly, and said it was placed beside the printing workshops on purpose.

The address is not accidental either. Królewska 17 is the second entrance to the House of Words, in a wing attached to the former Pociej palace. The “Popularna” printworks operated here from 1932 to 1951, and under the German occupation it also printed for the Polish underground. In March 1944 most of its printers were arrested; they were shot at Majdanek on 3 June that year.