Muzeum Neonów, Warsaw

Within the Palace of Culture and Science, Muzeum Neonów is a private museum devoted to safeguarding and recording Polish illuminated advertising created after the war. Notice the bent glass tubing and the graphic lettering: these signs were made to seize attention in the city’s evening streets. The museum’s story begins when Ilona Karwińska rescued the neon from the former Berlin shop on Marszałkowska Street in 2005.

That act of salvage grew into a collection of about 100 neon signs gathered from across Poland, largely dating from the 1960s and 1970s. Among them are signs from the Szanghaj and Ambasador restaurants, the Jaś i Małgosia café, and the Sezam cooperative department store. The sign from Warszawa Stadion railway station is probably the collection’s oldest.

The museum opened in May 2012 and moved into the Palace of Culture and Science in 2025. It is Poland’s first neon museum and among the rare museums of its kind worldwide. What began with a single rescued shop sign now gives these fragile pieces of postwar design a vivid afterlife.