Szlak JelonkówJelenia Góra Town Trail · the short route
The Karkonosze Museum
The Karkonosze Museum is one of the few buildings in town put up from the start to hold collections – it was not converted from a palace or a tenement. It opened on 14 April 1914 at half past eleven, after the collections had waited a quarter of a century for a home of their own, moving between three other addresses. This is the eleventh stop on the city centre route – the last on the city’s list.
Address: ul. Jana Matejki 28. Open Tuesday to Sunday, closed on Mondays; free entry to the permanent exhibitions on Wednesdays. Hours and prices are worth checking before a visit, as they differ in summer and winter.
First came the trails; the museum was a by-product
On 1 August 1880 the Riesengebirgsverein, known as the RGV, was founded in Jelenia Góra. Theodor Donat set it up, and its task was to open the mountains to walkers – which it did on a scale one would not suspect of an enthusiasts’ society. By 1930 it had marked and maintained 300 kilometres of trails: ninety in the Karkonosze, a hundred in the foothills, sixty in the Jizera Mountains, twenty in the Kaczawskie and thirty in the Krucze. It cost half a million marks.
For its twenty-fifth anniversary, in 1905, the society opened the “Jubilee Way” leading to the summit of Śnieżka. It also ran ten youth hostels, and in 1927 set up its own mountain guard to protect nature. The museum arose as a side effect of all this: members brought back diaries and books from their expeditions, which first became a library and then a museum collection.
A quarter of a century in other people’s rooms
The collections were first shown on 2 June 1889 – on the ground floor of the Royal Gymnasium on today’s ul. 1 Maja. Seven years later they moved a few doors along, and from 1 February 1902 they were housed on ul. Szkolna. For more than four decades they were looked after by one man: the curator Hugo Seydel, connected with the Jelenia Góra branch of the society from 1885 and its chairman from 1898. He died on 3 October 1932, aged ninety-two, still involved with the museum.
A house built for the collections
Work on a building of its own began on 3 June 1912 and finished on 14 April 1914 – a few months before the outbreak of the First World War. Earlier designs by Kühnemann and Drescher were rejected; the commission finally went to Carl Grosser, an architect working in Wrocław but born in Kowary, on the same side of the mountains.
The original arrangement of the displays says a good deal about what was then thought worth showing. The hall held glass, seal matrices, woodcarving and artistic locksmithing and ironwork. The craft guilds had a room of their own: cups, welcome goblets, chests and guild documents. The church room held sculpture, crucifixes, coffin plates and the organ from the Church of the Holy Spirit. There was also a room furnished as a burgher’s parlour, with portraits of merchant families on the walls, and old weapons hung in the staircase. The upper floor was given to painting, nature and the weaving tradition.
The cottage that is part of the museum
Adjoining the building on the south is a village cottage – and not a reconstruction put up for an exhibition, but a building furnished with original objects. It still contains an enormous stove, a canopied bed, a cradle, a dresser and a loom. The loom matters most here: for centuries weaving was the livelihood of these mountains, and the cottage shows the loom where it actually stood, in the living room.
At the back of the plot a garden was laid out with plants of the Karkonosze. It was looked after by Wilhelm Patschovsky – another trace of what the RGV really was: a society that treated the mountains as a whole, from the trail to the plant.
War, propaganda and the crates with Matejko
In 1938 and 1939 the museum was rebuilt to a design by Karl Albert to increase exhibition space. On the eve of the war it became the seat of the association of Heimatmuseen under the name Sudetenmuseum RGV and was harnessed to propaganda.
The most important day in the museum’s post-war history is 7 August 1945. Professor Stanisław Lorentz found crates containing paintings by Jan Matejko and deposited them in the Jelenia Góra museum. In memory of that the institution was given Matejko’s name. For the first years after the war, however, the museum was closed and served as a depot – between 1948 and 1950 forty-six thousand objects were catalogued here. It opened properly to visitors on 2 August 1953, and five years later showed the large exhibition “Jelenia Góra in the past”.
Why glass
The glass collection did not come from the taste of successive directors but from an administrative decision: from 1964, under the specialisation of Polish museums, Jelenia Góra was to collect artistic glass. The rest followed quickly. In 1967 the pattern room of the “Julia” glassworks handed over 282 historic pieces, including two goblets from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in 1974 another 298, and in 1995 as many as 1,184. Today the collection numbers over nine thousand objects.
Its shape is above all the work of Mieczysław Buczyński, an art historian connected with the museum for thirty-eight years. It is a rare case of a collection of European standing that can be attributed to one person and one consistently pursued acquisition policy.
It is worth remembering where the glass came from: in the Karkonosze and the Jizera Mountains glassworks were built where there was wood for fuel, that is high up in the forests. The collection therefore tells the story of an industry that shaped these mountains long before tourism.
The laboranci: herbalists with a guild of their own
The most interesting group in the ethnography department is the 92 objects left by the *laboranci*. The name comes from the Latin *laborare* – to work, to prepare. Georg Werner, an apothecary from Kłodzko, gave them their start, and in 1622 or 1623 a group of Protestant refugees from Bohemia settled in Karpacz and strengthened the centre.
By the early eighteenth century the laboranci had their own guild, with masters, journeymen and apprentices – they were a craft, not folk quackery. Their preparations reached not only Silesian markets but also Prague, Kraków, Vienna, Moscow and London. Their heyday fell between 1730 and 1780.
It ended by decree. Edicts of 1843 banned homeopathic practices and cut the number of simple preparations that could be made from forty-six to twenty-one, and a document of 30 September stopped the issuing of licences. The collection in Jelenia Góra is today one of the few material traces of the trade.
From the Museum RGV to the Karkonosze Museum
In 1975, when Jelenia Góra became a provincial capital, the museum was turned into a Regional Museum and began to acquire branches: Bolków Castle in 1977, the Museum of Struggle and Labour in Cieplice in 1980, and the House of Carl and Gerhart Hauptmann in Szklarska Poręba in 1995. In 2001 it returned to a name echoing the pre-war Museum RGV – the Karkonosze Museum.
The last major change was the renovation and extension of 2009–2011, to a design by Marek Skorupski, worth close to ten million złoty.
What else is nearby
The museum closes the city’s list for this route, which begins on Wzgórze Krzywoustego by the Grzybek tower. On the way you pass the basilica, the Town Hall Square and a whole series of figurines from the Deer Trail. The stop immediately before is the Norwid Theatre, a few minutes away.
If you still have the energy after the museum, ten minutes further on, below Wzgórze Kościuszki, are the Time Gates tunnels – the twelfth and last stop on the route.
Frequently asked questions
How old is the Karkonosze Museum? The collections were first shown on 2 June 1889 in the building of the Royal Gymnasium. The present building opened on 14 April 1914.
What is the Karkonosze Museum known for? Its collection of artistic glass, numbering over nine thousand objects. Glass has been the leading collection here since 1964, when the specialisation of Polish museums assigned the subject to Jelenia Góra.
Is there a cottage by the museum? Yes. A village cottage adjoins the building on the south, with original furnishings: a stove, a canopied bed, a cradle, a dresser and a loom.
Why did the museum bear Jan Matejko’s name? Because on 7 August 1945 Professor Stanisław Lorentz found crates of Matejko’s paintings and deposited them here. The name “Municipal Museum named after Jan Matejko” lasted only until 1949, though; today the institution is called the Karkonosze Museum – since 2001, echoing the pre-war Museum RGV.
Where is the museum and when is it open? At ul. Jana Matejki 28. Open Tuesday to Sunday, closed Mondays, with free entry to the permanent exhibitions on Wednesdays.
Who designed the museum building? Carl Grosser, an architect working in Wrocław and born in Kowary. Earlier designs by Kühnemann and Drescher were rejected.
Does the Karkonosze Museum have branches? Yes: the House of Carl and Gerhart Hauptmann in Szklarska Poręba, the Castle Museum in Bolków and the Museum of History and Militaria in Jelenia Góra.
