Otwarte Muzeum Odry, Wrocław

Otwarte Muzeum Odry is a floating museum: historic vessels moor on the Oder beside Szczytniki Lock, with the steam tug Nadbór at its heart. This is not a replica or a static shell. Nadbór is Poland’s sole surviving inland steamer kept close to its original form, retaining its steam engine, boiler room, controls, wheelhouse, equipment and sound hull.

The tug belongs to a postwar Dutch-built fleet ordered for work on the Oder; it was one of thirteen smaller vessels designed to handle barges on the canalised stretches of the river. Until around nineteen sixty-five, Nadbór pulled freight barges between the Kędzierzyn-Koźle and Gliwice area and Wrocław. Pushed convoys then replaced steam tugs, and by nineteen sixty-eight they had removed them from regular service.

Nadbór had several unexpected second lives: first as a floating boiler house, then on the Elbe in the Czech Republic, supplying steam and electricity to a waterworks construction site. A nineteen eighty-two trial as an icebreaker failed because its bow was unsuited to breaking ice. Restoration work began in July nineteen ninety-eight, and the vessel now serves as a laboratory, school and museum. The collection also includes Irena, a riveted steel barge built in Bydgoszcz in nineteen thirty-six, and Wróblin, a floating crane built in nineteen thirty-eight and nineteen thirty-nine.