Muzeum im. Emeryka Hutten-Czapskiego, Kraków

This is the Emeryk Hutten-Czapski Museum, a branch of Kraków’s National Museum, housed in the Czapski Palace and its purpose-built collecting pavilion. On the pavilion’s pediment, notice the Latin inscription: it declares that these are national treasures rescued from history’s storms. The museum takes its name from Count Emeryk Hutten-Czapski, who served as vice-governor of Saint Petersburg but devoted himself to books, prints, and above all coins.

At his family estate in Stankow, he assembled more than eleven thousand coins, medals, decorations, banknotes, prints, and books, cataloguing the collection himself. Concerned that it was too close to Russia, he brought it to Kraków and bought this nineteenth-century palace in 1894. He commissioned Tadeusz Stryjeński to design a separate pavilion, but died on the twenty-third of July 1896 before the work was complete.

His widow, Elżbieta, carried the project forward. The family gave the collection to Kraków in 1903, and the museum joined the National Museum the following year. After a major restoration, this palace reopened in 2013 as the European Centre of Polish Numismatics. Its collections bring together Polish coins, medals, banknotes, early printed books, and manuscripts—an extraordinary private passion turned into a public treasury.