Building of the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków at the Royal Wawel Castle

This photograph was taken by an unknown photographer in 1915, a year into the Great War, and in the third year of the Ethnographic Museum residing on the Wawel Hill. It is quite likely that the photo was taken by Leopold Węgrzynowicz, a member of the Society of the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków and a close collaborator of Seweryn Udziela at the time (in 1915, among other things, he made a series of slides to be used by the Museum). Another photo depicting one of the Museum exhibition rooms has also been identified as taken by him a little later.

In 1913, the Ethnographic Museum, founded just two years earlier, was housed in some of the rooms on the ground and the first floors of the former St Michael’s Seminary in Wawel, at no. 7, where at the time of the Partitions military barracks had been. The process of adapting the rooms to the needs of the Museum was completed in 1920. In 1915, the year this photograph was taken, five more rooms were furnished and opened to the public.

The photograph shows the four-storey, plaster-coated brick building covered with a tiled roof. It combines three historic, Gothic tenement houses and has a shaded, tiled porch, visible on the left. Single-storey utility buildings can be seen in front of it. On the right we see some small buildings enclosed by a wooden fence. Centre stage, on the front elevation, there is a sign that reads ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM.