Africanist Museum in Olkusz

What to expect

The room people remember from the Africanist Museum in Olkusz is a Tuareg tent of camel hide. It stands in the side wing of the town’s old hospital, furnished with everyday Tuareg household items. A travel portal and a signed visitor review both single it out. Give it a few unhurried minutes before you move on.

The other rooms reward slower looking at smaller things. Look for the wide herders’ hats of the Fulani, more than twenty pipes made of gourd, wood and the bone of wild animals, and Bakongo fetish figures once believed to hold magical power. Bambara ritual masks, weapons, instruments, cloth and jewellery fill the cases in between.

A separate department, added in 2007, holds the gift of Anna and Leon Kubarski. Here the surprises are in the materials: malachite carvings, small ivory heads with African hairstyles cut in fine detail, and pictures made from cut banana leaves and butterfly wings.

Nothing here is interactive. It is glass cases and written captions, which suits travellers already curious about ethnography or non-European art. Expect children from about eight to last around half an hour with the masks and weapons. If you need screens or hands-on stations, skip it. Allow 45 minutes, or about two hours if you add the two other museums in the building.

Tips

• Aim for 16:00, not 17:00. The doors close at 17:00, but the last visitors are let in at 16:30. Getting there by 16:00 leaves time for the Kubarski rooms as well as the tent.
• Saturday is your only weekend option. The museum is closed on Sunday and Monday, and Saturday keeps the weekday hours, 9:00 to 17:00. From Krakow, plan the trip for a Saturday or a weekday.
• One address, three museums. The culture centre gives ul. Szpitalna 32 as the address of this museum and of two more. The Minerals of the Olkusz Land collection holds several thousand specimens, the biggest ammonites almost half a metre across; the Władysław Wołkowski Museum is placed by the centre in the historic Machnicki manor house. In the centre’s own words, the Wołkowski rooms are “the largest collection of art by this outstanding artist, called the ‘Michelangelo of wicker’”. With identical hours, two hours covers all three.
• Book a timed slot online. The culture centre sells entry to its museums online for a set date and time. While booking, check whether a combined ticket for all three displays works out better for you.
• Captions: ask before you go. The museum does not say whether its labels are translated. Email muzea@mok.olkusz.pl ahead of the trip, or keep a camera translation app on your phone.
• On Saturday, this building is all Olkusz has open. The PTTK Regional Museum and the Firefighting Museum open Monday to Friday only and close at 16:00.
• Step-free access is unknown. No accessibility information is published, and the display sits in the side wing of a former hospital. Ring +48 32 706 52 44 and ask about stairs and a lift.

Getting there

By train: Polregio trains leave Krakow Główny for Olkusz several times a day and take about 1 hour 15 minutes. Olkusz station lies east of the museum, about a kilometre as the crow flies: walk just under 2 km, or take the local ZKG “KM” bus.

By car: Olkusz is about 36 km north-west of Krakow as the crow flies, on the DK94 towards Katowice; allow roughly an hour. The town lies on the Trail of the Eagles’ Nests, so the ruined Jurassic castles to the north make an easy add-on.

Parking: The local portal olkuszinfo.pl points drivers to free parking on ul. Mickiewicza.

On foot: The museum stands just south of the market square, under 200 metres as the crow flies from the PTTK Regional Museum at Rynek 20.

Nearby

On a weekday you can add two more of the town’s museums. The Firefighting Museum of the Olkusz Land is on Floriańska, and the PTTK Regional Museum on the market square covers the silver and lead mining the town grew on. Back in Krakow, the Ethnographic Museum makes the natural comparison: it reads everyday objects from the Polish countryside as evidence of a culture, the approach this collection takes to West and Central Africa.

Background

The side wing of the old hospital at Szpitalna 32 has been the museum’s home since 1984. Everything started with a gift in 1971 from dr Bogdan Szczygieł, an Olkusz physician and writer, and Bożena Szczygieł-Gruszyńska. Regional tourism sources say he spent well over a decade in Africa, much of it around the Sahara, and what he brought back were things people used, not souvenirs.

Before the move, the objects were kept on the same street, at Szpitalna 11, in a former coffee-grinder workshop owned by his father. The rooms you see today date from a 2005 renovation; the Kubarski department, a gift from professor Anna Kubarska and the pilot Leon Kubarski, followed in February 2007.

Later private donors added to the holdings, and the Silesian region’s Jura tourism portal counts Olkusz among the largest museums of African art and culture in Poland.