Muzeum Warszawy, Warszawa

Muzeum Warszawy fills a run of joined townhouses on the Old Town Market Square, holding objects that tell Warsaw’s story. The linked façades make the museum feel woven into the square itself. Its premises spread across eleven connected houses, with eight facing Dekert’s stretch of the market and another group on Nowomiejska Street.

Founded in nineteen thirty-six as the Museum of Old Warsaw, it began within a small group of municipal properties here. In nineteen forty-four, the Warsaw Uprising brought destruction to the museum building and much of its collection. The postwar rebuilding of these houses unfolded from nineteen forty-eight through nineteen fifty-four, as the Old Town was reconstructed.

The cellars beneath the Dekert-side houses yielded an unexpected cache during renovation: twelve hundred and eleven coins, struck from the seventeenth century into the early eighteenth. A well from the later seventeenth century emerged there too. The museum now cares for about three hundred thousand works, ranging from archaeological finds to art, coins, and architectural drawings. Its permanent exhibition, Warsaw Things, gathers thousands of objects into themed rooms, inviting you to meet the capital through the things its people made, used, kept, and lost.