Baj, Warszawa

Baj is the puppet theatre housed here on Jagiellońska Street, at number twenty-eight. Founded in nineteen twenty-eight, it is Poland’s oldest institution devoted to puppet theatre. Since nineteen fifty-four, its home has been this former educational building of Warsaw’s Jewish community, named for Michał Bergson.

The theatre occupies the central street-facing part of the structure, as well as the fourth floor and the attic. Its larger auditorium combines a movable stage with an audience of one hundred eighty, while an intimate room accommodates twenty-five. That difference lets Baj create both a lively shared occasion and a close-scale theatrical encounter.

Maria Kownacka was among the artists who collaborated with the theatre. In twenty fourteen, Baj received the Gold Medal for Merit to Culture, Gloria Artis, a national cultural distinction. Take in the building’s frontage along Jagiellońska and picture the variety of puppet worlds that can emerge from rooms of such different scale. Baj’s long life makes this address a lasting home for an art form built from movement, voice, and imagination.