Nicholaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork
Muzeum Mikołaja Kopernika
ul. Katedralna 8, 14-530 Frombork
Director:
tel. (+48 55) 244 00 71
fax (+48 55) 244 00 72
www.frombork.art.pl

Opening hours: Closed Mondays and public holidays; open all other days 9am-4pm; in summer (April-September) open 9am-5pm.

The Nicolaus Copernicus Museum was established in Frombork in 1984. It was in this town that Kopernik - the great astronomer and the Canon of the Warmian Chapter - lived and worked from 1510 to 1543.

The Museum is housed in the buildings of a cathedral assembly dating from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Restored after World War II, the assembly embraces the Bishops' Palace, the bellfry called the Radziejowski Tower with a planetarium in its basement, the Kopernik Tower (the astronomer's accommodation), the canonries and the New Curacy. Since recently the Museum has also run a summertime astronomical observatory on the so-called Gora zurawia (Crane Hill) and has owned - since 1990 - the assembly of the Holy Spirit Hospital at Stara Street, unique in being Poland's only hospital building to have survived unchanged from the late seventeenth century. Indeed, the hospital chapel has been found to contain earlier, fifteenth-century paintings with scenes of the Last Judgement. The two preserved stoves of the former bath are equally old. Nowadays the hospital building houses the Department of the History of Medicine (for Kopernik was also a medical doctor), and medicinal herbs grow in the botanical garden (the herbarium) at the back.

The Museum's collection includes objects associated with Kopernik and those related to the history of astronomy and medicine. There are two copies of Kopernik's most famous work, "De revolutionibus..." from 1566 and 1617, other old prints, sixteenth through nineteenth century engravings, as well as post stamps related to astronomy and medicine. The Museum preserves eighteenth and nineteenth century astronomical instruments and copies of devices used by Kopernik himself, all medals ever made in honour of Kopernik, apothecary ampoules, bottles, jars, mortars and wooden containers, some of which date from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Visitors can also see archeological finds from the area of Frombork and the Cathedral Hill, decorative arts ranging in date from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, as well as contemporary painting, prints, sculpture and textiles.

Permanent exhibitions: "Mikolaj Kopernik"; "Frombork: A History of Material Culture"; "Mikolaj Kopernik: Portraits on Medals and Plaques"; "A Glimpse into the History of Astronomy"; "Frombork's Stained Glass"; "Warmian Sacred Painting and Sculpture of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"; "Imported Stones (Meteorites)"; "The Study of a Renaissance Scholar" (inside the Kopernik Tower); "From the History of Medicine" (at the Holy Spirit Hospital); Modern Art Gallery (inside the bellfry).

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