Muzeum Cechu Rzemiosł Skórzanych, Warszawa

The Museum of the Leather Crafts Guild occupies the Shoemakers’ House in Warsaw’s Old Town. Its collection includes working equipment from shoemaking and saddlery, guild records, excavated leather goods, and a buckle worn by Jan Kiliński. Portraits of craft patrons add a personal thread to the story.

Within the Shoemakers’ House at Wąski Dunaj ten, entered from Szeroki Dunaj, this is the Museum of the Leather Crafts Guild, dedicated to Jan Kiliński. Founded in nineteen seventy-three by the guild, the museum reveals how leather-working handcraft workshops were organised and how their makers worked. Its rooms hold a shoemaker’s workshop and a saddler’s workshop, each supplied with a full nineteenth-century tool kit.

You can encounter an upper-making sewing machine and the saddler’s horse used for stitching harness. Guild documents carry an even longer memory: a saddlers’ statute bears the signature of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, while a register records admissions to municipal citizenship across centuries. Footwear and harness recovered during the postwar rebuilding of the Old Town connect the collection to the fabric beneath Warsaw itself.

A belt buckle once worn by Kiliński was found in the cellar of his home on Szeroki Dunaj. Portraits of Kiliński and of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, patrons of shoemakers and saddlers, keep the human faces of the craft close at hand.