Description of the attraction
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 in the National Museum for the first time, which included exhibits by Severin Udelo, Stanislav Witkiewicz and Tadeusz Estreich. 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 displayed at the Wawel Castle. After the end of World War II, the building of the former Town Hall was transferred to the museum. To date, 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 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% is from non-European territories.
Most of the objects date from the nineteenth century, and there are older objects such as fragments of the seventeenth century iconostasis and the Tibetan collection of the eighteenth century. 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.
