Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre

Practical info

What to expect

The Centre, known in English as the Grodzka Gate - NN Theatre Centre, is a municipal cultural institution that has worked in Lublin since 1998. Its home is the Grodzka Gate itself, once the Jewish Gate: the passage between the Christian town and the Jewish town that no longer exists. The NN Theatre began here in 1990 as part of Lublin’s alternative theatre movement, but the discovery of the Gate’s own past redirected it towards memory work. In this eastern Polish city it is the most unusual heritage institution: not a museum of display cases, but an archive you walk through.

The permanent exhibition Lublin. Pamiec Miejsca, meaning memory of the place, fills 1,500 square metres across four adjoining buildings on Grodzka Street. It is built to look like the inside of an archive, with metal shelving carrying thousands of binders on individual houses, streets and former residents of the Jewish quarter, and more than a dozen computer stations giving access to the Centre’s iconography and Oral History databases. Visitors move past hundreds of photographs, a scale model of the pre-war city and a reconstructed soundscape of its streets. The first section covers Jewish life up to 1939, when almost 43,000 of Lublin’s 120,000 inhabitants were Jews; the second commemorates those murdered in the Holocaust; the third tells the stories of the Righteous Among the Nations.

The Centre also runs four other sites. The Lublin Underground Trail runs nearly 300 metres beneath the Market Square, linking more than a dozen cellars dating back to the sixteenth century and culminating in a moving model of the Great Fire of Lublin of 1719, staged with light and sound. Alongside it are the Cellar under Fortuna, the Imaginarium Theatre and the House of Words with its Printing Room, where typographic and bookbinding workshops are held.

Tips

The exhibition can only be seen on a guided tour at fixed times. English-language tours run on weekdays at 12:00 and on Saturdays at 12:00 from May to September; Polish tours run on weekdays at 10:00 and 14:00 and on Saturdays at 15:00 in season. A tour lasts 75 minutes, groups are capped at 30 and the recommended age is 14 and over. Tickets in a foreign language cost 45 PLN full and 35 PLN reduced, against 35 and 20 PLN in Polish; buy them online or at the Information Centre. A 30-day pass at 95 PLN (67 PLN reduced) adds the House of Words, the Underground Trail and the Cellar under Fortuna, but it is sold in person only.

The Underground Trail is entered separately, down the steps beside the Crown Tribunal; allow 45 minutes and expect 8-12 degrees Celsius. The Centre states plainly that its historic buildings are not accessible to wheelchair users: no lifts, roughly 150 steps and narrow passages. An audio guide is available and assistance dogs are welcome.

Getting there

The Centre is at ul. Grodzka 21, 20-112 Lublin, in the middle of the Old Town, on the axis running between the Market Square and Lublin Castle; you enter through the Information Centre on the ground floor. The nearest public transport stops are Muzeum Narodowe - Zamek 01 and 02 and Brama Krakowska 02 and 04. The closest paid car park, which includes bays for disabled drivers, is on Plac Zamkowy and is not run by the Centre. Old Town paving is rough, unpolished granite setts. The Underground Trail has its own office at Rynek 1, inside the Crown Tribunal.

Nearby museums

A few hundred metres away stands Lublin Castle and the National Museum, whose hill overlooks the emptiness left where the Jewish quarter stood. At the other end of the Old Town, the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin in the Krakow Gate continues the story of the town walls, while the Jozef Czechowicz literary museum covers literary Lublin.