Wiktor Ambroziewicz Museum of the Chełm Land

Practical info

What to expect

Museum-keeping in Chełm began in 1882, when the Russian authorities then ruling the region set up a Church and Archaeological Museum around icons, books and liturgical objects stripped from Greek Catholic churches after the Union was suppressed in 1875. The First World War destroyed that collection. The few surviving pieces went in 1919 to the Stefan Czarniecki grammar school, where the headmaster Wiktor Ambroziewicz began assembling the first Museum of the Chełm Land in independent Poland. After the Second World War the local historian Kazimierz Janczykowski rebuilt it; since 1969 the collections have been housed in the former Piarist College at Lubelska 55. The museum took Ambroziewicz’s name by a resolution of the Chełm city council in 2009.

Today it runs eleven curatorial departments across four buildings and holds some twenty thousand objects. Lubelska 55, the old Piarist college, houses the contemporary art department together with Galeria 72, founded in 1972, and the library. A row of nineteenth-century townhouses at number 57 contains natural history, history and the numismatic cabinet. The former Zwierciadło printing works at Lubelska 56a holds archaeology and ethnography, while the art of the Chełm Land is displayed in a former Uniate church at św. Mikołaja 4. In rented cellars of the old secret police headquarters at Reformacka 27, the museum shows an exhibition on the Chełm security service and its victims.

The temporary programme is more ambitious than the town’s size would suggest: recent shows have included Henri Matisse’s paper cut-outs, Mira Żelechower-Aleksiun’s calendar of memory after Bruno Schulz, and a social history of Lwowska Street and its traders. An annual Jewish Culture Meetings weekend revisits the multicultural past of pre-war Chełm.

Tips

You can buy a ticket for one exhibition in a single building (20 zl standard, 15 zl reduced) or a pass covering all the buildings (40 zl and 30 zl), which lets you start anywhere and visit in any order. Children under seven enter free, and every Thursday is free for everyone. A guided tour of one exhibition costs 50 zl; museum lessons and workshops are 20 zl per person. The museum reckons the whole circuit takes about three hours, with roughly a kilometre of walking between the buildings. Watch the clock: last entry is 15:30, and on Saturdays and Sundays the doors only open at 12:00. Accessibility is partial. The Lubelska 55 entrance is at street level and a stair-climber is available at św. Mikołaja 4, but displays are spread over several floors reached only by stairs. Assistance dogs are welcome in every building.

Getting there

The head office is at Lubelska 55 in Chełm, postcode 22-100, and the other three buildings are all a short walk away: two of them next door at numbers 56a and 57, the fourth on św. Mikołaja Street. Everything sits in the town centre. Chełm lies about 70 kilometres east of Lublin, close to the Ukrainian border. The museum does not list bus numbers on its own pages; marked disabled parking bays exist only outside the building at number 56a.

Nearby museums

Chełm is a natural base for the eastern edge of the Lublin region. To the north are the Sobibór memorial museum and the synagogue complex in Włodawa, both extending the Jewish history the Chełm museum touches on. Southwards, the Staszic museum in Hrubieszów is another regional collection with a strong archaeological side.