Longin Kowalczyk Museum of the Łuków Land in Łuków

Practical info

What to expect

The museum occupies the former Szaniawski boarding school, a brick building put up in 1732 and listed in the regional heritage register under the number A/661, its shape unchanged since. Townspeople first proposed a museum here in 1920, but the institution was only established on 1 January 1960, after years of lobbying by the Friends of the Łuków Land Society, and its first exhibitions in its own premises opened on 7 March 1967. It is named after Longin Kowalczyk, its first member of staff, who from July 1960 travelled the county collecting objects. Since renovation work ended in 1998 the museum has had eight exhibition rooms totalling 558 square metres.

Its calling card is the permanent display of Łuków ammonites. The fossils come from a Jurassic raft of rock carried here by the ice sheet and exposed near the town; the fauna was described in H. Makowski’s 1952 monograph, based on material from the Łapiguz site. They sit inside spherical and pear-shaped concretions whose iron-rich interiors make the shells shimmer in rainbow colours. Łuków ammonites rarely exceed 20 centimetres across, and they come with belemnites, bivalves, gastropods, brachiopods, bryozoans, foraminifera and crinoids, all in unusually good condition.

The remaining galleries are firmly regional. “In the Field and the Farmyard” shows farm tools, folk costume and household equipment from around 1900; “Not Only Honey” traces beekeeping in the Łuków Land; further rooms cover the history of the town and, under the title “We Lived Here”, the story of its Jewish community. The most distinctive room belongs to the Łuków Folk Sculpture Centre, a phenomenon the museum itself created from 1965 with no local precedent: plain, boldly expressive, strongly coloured carving begun by Marian Adamski and later shown in Italy, Germany, Canada and the United States.

Tips

The museum opens six days a week: Monday to Friday from 8:00 to 16:00 and Sunday from 11:00 to 15:00. It closes on Saturdays and on Polish public holidays, but a visit at any other time can be arranged by phone, by post or in person. A full ticket costs 10 PLN, a concession 7 PLN and a family ticket for up to six people 30 PLN; entry is free on Sundays, which is the cheapest slot and also the shortest one. Check the news page before travelling: the museum shuts on selected Sundays when it takes an open-air display to a local festival.

A museum lesson or workshop costs 8 PLN, and selected folk-craft workshops 15 PLN. Free audio guides to five of the permanent exhibitions are streamed from the museum’s own website, so bring headphones; note that they exist in Polish only. Since 1 January 2022 a stair platform on the courtyard side serves wheelchair users.

Getting there

The museum stands at ul. Piłsudskiego 19 in Łuków (postcode 21-400), in a building with its own courtyard, close to the town centre. Łuków is a small county town in the northern part of the Lublin region of eastern Poland, just under 100 kilometres north of Lublin and roughly halfway between Lublin and Warsaw. The museum’s website names neither bus routes nor parking, so it is worth ringing the number on the contact page for directions, especially as any visit outside the standard hours has to be agreed in advance anyway.

Nearby museums

Łuków has no second museum, so its neighbours lie across the north of the region. To the east, the museum in Biała Podlaska has a similar regional remit but a far larger art department. The August Zamoyski sculpture museum in Jabłoń is a sharp counterpoint to Łuków folk carving, and west of the town lies the Polish Air Force museum in Dęblin.