Jelenia Góra Town Trail · the long route · Cieplice

Natural History Museum

Of the roughly three hundred and twenty species of hummingbird known to science, three hundred and two were gathered in Cieplice. Not in Berlin, not in London – in a spa town below the Karkonosze, in the private collection of one family, worked on for eighty years by a father and his son. Today that collection stands in the former Cistercian monastery on ul. Cieplicka, a few dozen metres from the building where it stood longest.

It began with a library in Sobieszów

The foundation of everything was the library that Count Johann Anton Schaffgotsch (1675–1742) established in the new palace in Sobieszów. In 1733, by a deed of foundation, he created a family library and obliged his successors to keep enlarging it. It held not only books and documents but also mementoes and a cabinet of curiosities – a collection of odd things meant to astonish guests and testify to the breadth of the owner's interests.

After the founder's death the collections declined and were put in order only after the Napoleonic wars. In the 1820s the library and the collections were moved from Sobieszów to Cieplice – to the upper, empty floors of the former presbytery, which the count had bought back from the state in 1810. On 1 July 1834 the library opened.

From that same year Count Leopold Christian Schaffgotsch (1793–1864) began showing the collections to visitors – in the Red House. A spa guest came for the waters and looked at minerals, shells and fossils along the way. Wincenty Pol, who visited the library in 1847, counted over twelve thousand specimens of minerals alone and fifty thousand works in the book collection.

1876: the birds move into the Long House

In 1876 Count Ludwig Gotard Schaffgotsch opened the ornithological collections to the public, moved from the Red House to the Long House, and combined them with the collection of a local physician, Doctor E. Luks. Four years later he hired a curator and taxidermist – Georg Martini (1860–1931).

That appointment turned out to be the most important decision in the history of this collection. Martini worked on it for fifty years, and after him, for another thirty, his son Kurt (1891–1969) – until 1950. Eighty years of continuous work by two men turned a private holding into one of the largest private ornithological collections in Europe. From 1920 it occupied eight rooms.

What stood in those eight rooms

The figures the museum gives are impressive even today:

• about 3,000 species of bird – out of a class numbering roughly 8,500 species;
• about 1,000 nests with 7,000 eggs, many species shown from egg through chick to adults of both sexes;
• 291 of the roughly 330 breeding species of Silesia, in 1,013 specimens;
• 302 of the roughly 320 known species of hummingbird – an almost complete set;
• 200 species of parrot out of 320 known, 75 of 85 toucans and hornbills;
• over 13,000 butterflies from around the world, from the smallest to specimens more than ten centimetres across from the forests of the Amazon.

The pride of the Silesian section was a golden eagle taken in 1873 near Szklarska Poręba – a bird already rare here at the time. Scholars came to Cieplice from all over Germany for these collections, looking for specimens found nowhere else.

War, nationalisation and removals

In 1945 the Long House was taken over by the Polish authorities, and as early as April 1946 the institution opened under the name Museum in Cieplice. It was one of the earliest post-war museums opened in the region.

Then the story speeds up in a way that proved costly for the collections. On 1 January 1950 the museum was nationalised; from then on it came under the Ministry of Culture and Art, but the building remained the property of the spa company. In January 1951 it was subordinated to the Silesian Museum in Wrocław. In 1952 a “reorganisation” began, under which “surplus exhibits” were taken away from Cieplice, with Wrocław deciding who should receive them. In 1953 – after the most valuable collections had gone – the rooms were refurbished and new permanent displays built, now only natural history ones.

On 12 September 1954 the institution opened as the Natural History Museum in Cieplice Śląskie. That date is the beginning of today's institution – and at the same time the moment when all that remained of the great, many-branched Schaffgotsch collection was the natural history part.

Three moves within a kilometre

After the war the museum had three addresses, and all of them lie right beside one another.

The Long House – until the 1960s. The move came from something prosaic: the museum belonged to the state and the building to the spa company. The growing conflict ended in 1967 with a relocation.

The Norwegian Pavilion in the Spa Park – from 1967 to 2013. A wooden building that had earlier served quite different purposes was for forty-six years the address of Cieplice's natural history. Today it houses a restaurant.

The former Cistercian monastery at ul. Cieplicka 11A – today. The collection thus returned to the complex it came out of in the nineteenth century: the entail library had, after all, stood on the floors of the former presbytery.

That last move has one more advantage. Baroque frescoes from the seventeenth century survive in the building, so you are looking at two things at once – the collection and the interior it stands in.

What you will see today

The museum has the largest display in the form of dioramas – animals shown in recreated fragments of their habitats rather than in rows of cases. There is also an entomological exhibition with Polish and foreign specimens, “The Mysterious World of Fungi” and “Zoogeographical Regions”. Separately stand exhibits connected with the history of Cieplice, of the spa and of the Schaffgotsches themselves.

The museum is open seasonally and at different hours in winter and summer – current information is best checked before your visit.

A walk in the tracks of one collection

If you are walking the trail, you have a chance to see all the addresses of this collection in a quarter of an hour. The Schaffgotsch Palace – the source of the library and the cabinet of curiosities. The Long House – where the birds stood for nearly a hundred years and where the museum worked. The Norwegian Pavilion – the seat from 1967 to 2013. The monastery on ul. Cieplicka – where those same specimens stand now.

A collection two hundred years in the making went through four moves after the war and came back to an address next door to the one it started from.