Wincenty Pol Manor House

Practical info

What to expect

Lublin, the largest city in eastern Poland, is best known for its castle and Old Town, but this small branch of the National Museum sits well away from both. The building it occupies is a classicist manor built of larch wood at the end of the 18th century on Firlejowszczyzna, a modest farmstead then outside Lublin. Between 1804 and 1810 the estate belonged to Franciszek Ksawery Poll, father of the poet and geographer Wincenty Pol; the family sold it after moving to Lwow, and in 1860 the Citizens of the Lublin Voivodeship bought it back for them as a gift, for another nineteen years. Industry swallowed the surroundings in the following decades, so in 1969 the manor was dismantled and re-erected at ul. Kalinowszczyzna 13 as the first object of an open-air museum planned on the spot. The museum of the Poet-Geographer opened here on 2 December 1972, the centenary of Pol’s death; when the open-air museum moved elsewhere in 1977, the manor passed to the municipal museum that is today the National Museum in Lublin. On its own English pages the institution calls itself the Museum of the Manor House of Wincenty Pol.

The permanent display fills two hallways and three ground-floor rooms. None of the original furnishings survived and the curators deliberately did not attempt a reconstruction: what you see is a museum arrangement of period objects, a setting for a biography. Pol was born in Lublin on 20 April 1807, fought in the November Uprising in Lithuania and was decorated with the Virtuti Militari, published his first volume of verse in Paris in 1835, walked and mapped the Eastern Carpathians, Podolia, Polesia, the Tatras, Silesia and as far as the island of Ruegen, and in 1849 founded the first chair of geography in Poland and the second in Europe after Berlin, at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

The holdings include manuscripts of his poems, letters exchanged with writers such as Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski and Seweryn Goszczynski, family documents and photographs, paintings and drawings by his grandson Juliusz Pol, 19th-century furniture, and a rare collection of more than 120 Polish-language terrestrial globes spanning the 19th to the 21st century. A basement added between 1990 and 1994 carries temporary exhibitions on natural history, literature and art, and hosts concerts and author evenings.

Tips

The manor is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 to 17:00, and closed on Sundays, Mondays and on 15 August. A standard ticket is 10 PLN and a reduced one 8 PLN, the cheapest admission anywhere in the National Museum in Lublin. Free-admission days are announced for this branch month by month rather than as a fixed weekday: Fridays in July, and 7, 13, 21 and 28 August. A guided tour costs 35 PLN on top of admission, a museum lesson 40 PLN and a workshop 45 PLN, and all three need to be arranged in advance on +48 81 747 24 13 or at dworekpola@mnwl.pl; the site does not state whether tours are given in English, so ask when booking. If you also plan to see the castle, a combined ticket covering the permanent galleries, the chapel, the tower and all branches costs 50 PLN (40 PLN reduced) and is sold only at the castle desk. Photography inside is allowed for private use only, without flash or tripod.

Getting there

The museum stands at ul. Kalinowszczyzna 13 (20-129 Lublin) in Kalinowszczyzna, a former suburb north-east of the castle hill and a short ride from the Old Town rather than a stop on it. The museum directs visitors arriving by public transport to the plac Singera stop on ul. Lwowska; drivers approach from ul. Lwowska as well, and no museum car park is mentioned. Do not confuse the address with the main seat at ul. Zamkowa: they are two separate places in the city.

Nearby museums

As a branch of the National Museum, the manor pairs naturally with Lublin Castle and its Holy Trinity Chapel, which the same combined ticket covers. For more literary Lublin, the Jozef Czechowicz literary museum tells the story of the city’s interwar poet. And since this manor was the first building of an open-air museum that was eventually built elsewhere, the Lublin open-air village museum is its natural sequel.