The Things of Warsaw

The book accompanying our core exhibition. As all featured objects of each of the rooms described in it, the publication is a thing of beauty itself.

A perfect reference work both before and after the visit. It can be purchased at the entrance to the museum for PLN 49 or online in Museum.

From Prof. Maria Porzęcka’s cover note:

A sugar cube left behind by a convict in a prison cell of the Tenth Pavilion at the Warsaw Citadel, preserved by the family as a relic.

Smashed bottles from the Royal Pharmacy, which owe their rainbowy shine of ancient glassware to the flames of fires.

Magnificent silver tableware from wealthy Warsaw houses. linen identification tag embroidered by a mother for her child during the siege of Warsaw.

Views of the city preserved by artists, a city both beautiful and unsightly, ruined and proudly commemorating its reconstruction – hundreds of objects, each carrying in itself a chapter from the history of Warsaw.

Grand History as well as microstories, they are innumerable and still alive: private, family, handed down in memories and stories. Only when woven together do they create a multi-layered, dense and tangled historic tissue of the city.

Things of Warsaw – those unforgettable, such as the famous image by an insurgent photographer that shows the explosion of a missile hitting the Prudential edifice on 28 August 1944, and those forgotten, such as crochet hooks used to lace women’s corsets. They do not offer us a single story of the city’s past. They refer to emotions, memory, imagination, which can sometimes be activated by a seemingly trivial splinter of the bygone eras. Thus, everyone can build their own history of the extraordinary city of Warsaw, and feel part of that history.