Ethnographic Museum (Muzeum Etnograficzne) description and photos - Poland: Krakow (Topic)

Ethnographic Museum (Muzeum Etnograficzne) description and photos - Poland: Krakow. Detailed information about the attraction. Description, photographs and a map showing the nearest significant objects. The title in English is Muzeum Etnograficzne.

Photo and description

The Ethnographic Museum is located in Krakow in the building of the former Town Hall. For the first time, the idea of opening an ethnographic museum in Krakow was born in 1902 during a folk art exhibition organized by Severin Udelo in cooperation with the Polish Society of Applied Arts. Soon, an ethnographic department with a permanent exhibition was opened for the first time in the National Museum, which included exhibits by Severin Udelo, Stanislav Witkiewicz and Tadeusz Estraich. In 1911, the Society of the Ethnographic Museum was created, which began collecting exhibits for a separate museum. An exposition from the National Museum was also transferred to the society.

The collected objects were exhibited at the Wawel Castle. After the end of the Second World War, the building of the former City Hall was transferred to the museum. Today the collection of the museum includes more than 80,000 exhibits.

At first, it was planned to create a collection of only Polish folk culture. Over time, the museum's management decided to include collections from non-European countries, hoping to create a separate department dedicated to exotic cultures. Today, the collection is based on Polish objects, about 13% of the collection comes from other European countries, and 11% are exhibits brought from non-European territories.

Most of the objects date from the nineteenth century, there are also older objects, such as fragments of a seventeenth-century iconostasis and an eighteenth-century Tibetan collection. Collections of archival manuscripts, drawings, photographs, postcards and leaflets are especially valuable.

In 1997, the museum acquired a rich collection of archival materials during the liquidation of the research laboratory of folk art of the Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The museum's library contains over 30 thousand valuable volumes.

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Topic: Ethnographic Museum (Muzeum Etnograficzne) description and photos - Poland: Krakow.