Biblioteka Książąt Czartoryskich, Kraków

Biblioteka Książąt Czartoryskich is the Czartoryski Library, part of Kraków’s National Museum, on św. Marka Street. Notice the restrained façade: it shelters a collection whose travels mirror Poland’s upheavals.

Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski and Izabela Czartoryska created this foundation library in the later eighteenth century. By 1830, it held roughly 70,000 printed works and 3,000 manuscripts. After the November Uprising was defeated and the family estate seized, the collection was divided among several places, including Paris.

Prince Władysław later gathered it again and installed it in Kraków’s former Municipal Arsenal in 1874; the associated museum opened soon afterward, in 1876. During the German occupation, the library shut its doors, its holdings were plundered, and only part returned after the war. Its shelves now preserve more than 245,000 written treasures, ranging from the tenth through the twentieth centuries. Among them are state documents connected with the Union of Horodło and the Prussian Homage, alongside handwritten letters by Copernicus, Beethoven, Luther, and Mickiewicz.