Explore Warsaw

The National Museum in Warsaw was founded in 1862 as the Museum of Fine Arts and moved in 1938 into its modernist building on Jerusalem Avenue, designed by Tadeusz Tołwiński. Its collection of over 830,000 objects ranges from ancient art to Polish painting; the Faras Gallery shows wall paintings from a Nubian cathedral, and Jan Matejko's Battle of Grunwald hangs here.

Copernicus Science Centre is a science museum on the bank of the Vistula, opened in 2010 in a building by the RAr-2 architects with a garden on its roof. Its galleries hold several hundred hands-on exhibits for carrying out experiments yourself, and it has laboratories, a robot theatre and the Heavens of Copernicus planetarium in a boulder-shaped building.

The Warsaw Rising Museum is dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and opened on 31 July 2004, the 60th anniversary of its outbreak, in a former tram power station in the Wola district. Exhibits include weapons, armbands, letters and photographs, a replica B-24 Liberator bomber and a reconstructed sewer passage; a wall in the park bears the names of the fallen.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews stands in Muranów, on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The building by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma opened in 2013; its core exhibition traces a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland in eight galleries, from the first settlers to the Holocaust and the post-war years.

The Polish Vodka Museum opened in 2018 in the former rectification building of the Koneser vodka factory in Praga, a brick building where spirit was purified from 1897 to 1970. Guided tours lead through four multimedia galleries on more than 500 years of vodka-making in Poland, from medieval distilling to bottles and labels of the last century, and end with a tasting.