PTTK Regional Museum in Olkusz

What to expect

The PTTK Regional Museum in Olkusz, named after Antoni Minkiewicz, occupies Batorówka, a historic sixteenth-century townhouse on the town’s market square. Founded in 1911 and run by the Aleksander Janowski branch of the Polish Tourist and Sightseeing Society (PTTK), it holds more than 700 exhibits arranged in four departments: the history of the town and region, ethnography, ore mining and geology.

Among the highlights are a sword from the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, old mining tools, nineteenth-century lithographs by Napoleon Orda, historic maps and photographs, folk wayside shrines, Judaica, and local fossils and minerals. The museum also keeps a library of archival material and documents reaching back to the fifteenth century. For an international visitor it is a concise, authentic introduction to the silver-and-lead mining heritage that once made Olkusz wealthy.

Visiting in practice

The museum is open Monday to Friday from 8:00 to 16:00. On Saturdays and Sundays group visits are possible by prior telephone arrangement. Allow about an hour to work through the four departments at an unhurried pace. Displays are chiefly labelled in Polish.

Getting there

Olkusz lies about 40 km north-west of Krakow on the Krakow-Częstochowa Upland. By car the DK94 road takes roughly an hour; the museum stands on the market square in the heart of the old town. Trains and buses also run from Krakow, and it is a walk of about fifteen minutes from the station to the square. The town makes a good base for exploring the Trail of the Eagles’ Nests.

Nearby

The mining thread of the Olkusz collection continues at the Cracow Saltworks Museum in Wieliczka. For more regional history of western Małopolska, the Kłosiński Museum in Kęty is a natural companion, while the deep past of the Polish lands is covered at Krakow’s Archaeological Museum.