Father Stanisław Staszic Museum in Hrubieszów

Practical info

What to expect

The museum occupies the du Chateau manor, a single-storey house with a taller central block and a recessed four-column portico whose pediment carries the building date, 1791. It stands where a castle was destroyed in 1648 by Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s forces, and the estate around it was bought in 1800 on behalf of Father Stanisław Staszic, the priest and reformer who founded the Hrubieszow Agricultural Society here in 1816, one of the earliest cooperatives on Polish soil. From 1859 the house served the du Chateau family for more than a century as a manor and pharmacy; German troops rebuilt the interiors during the occupation, and after the war it housed the local NKVD headquarters.

The museum opened on 6 November 1965 on the initiative of the Hrubieszow Regional Society and unveiled its permanent displays in the restored manor in December 1984. Five of them fill the rooms: archaeology, ethnography (crafts, traditions and rituals), history of a region at the meeting point of cultures, a section on Staszic and his Agricultural Society, and art. Archaeology is the strongest suit. The first excavations anywhere in the Lublin region were dug in the 1820s by Adam Czarnocki, known as Zorian Dołęga Chodakowski, at Gródek where the Huczwa joins the Bug, and the modern results from Gródek reached the pages of Nature as evidence in the debate over Slavic migrations.

The museum also runs the underground Laboratorium Historiae Gothorum hall in nearby Masłomęcz, where the exhibition Goths. Heritage hidden in the earth opened on 28 April 2026 with several thousand objects from more than a dozen Polish museums, next to a reconstructed Goth village.

Tips

The manor is open seven days a week: Monday to Friday 9:00-16:00, Saturday and Sunday 10:00-15:00. A standard ticket costs 8 PLN, a reduced one 4 PLN and a senior ticket 6 PLN; children under seven accompanied by family and leaders of organised groups enter free. The free-entry day rotates with the season: Saturday from 1 September to 30 June, Monday in July and Thursday in August. Allow about an hour. A guided tour costs 40 PLN, a museum lesson 5 PLN per person and a field guide 50 PLN per hour, booked two weeks ahead. Photography is free but strictly for private use.

Masłomęcz needs its own slot: the film and exhibition take about 1.5 hours there, and the combined ticket with the Goth village adds another half hour. The documentary is narrated in Polish with English, German or Ukrainian subtitles. Opening times there are announced season by season, so confirm them before setting off.

Getting there

The museum sits at ul. 3 Maja 11 in Hrubieszow, above the channel of the Huczwa river where the manor’s walking garden and its sundial once stood. Hrubieszow lies in the far south-eastern corner of the Lublin voivodeship, close to the Ukrainian border and roughly 120 kilometres from Lublin by road via Zamosc or Chelm. The museum lists no city bus routes on its website, so the practical options are to drive or take a coach to Hrubieszow and walk in; the Masłomęcz site (Masłomęcz 99A) needs your own transport.

Nearby museums

Hrubieszow pairs naturally with its neighbours in the south-east. The Museum of the Chełm Land covers the same Bug borderland from the north, the Zamosc Museum adds the Zamoyski family’s Renaissance town, and the regional museum in Tomaszow Lubelski completes the picture with the Roztocze hills.