Karkonosze Museum in Jelenia Góra

The Karkonosze Museum holds more than 9,000 pieces of art glass – from Baroque goblets made in local mountain glassworks to an iridescent plate by Louis Tiffany. The building at Matejki Street 28 was built for the museum in 1912–1914, and a wooden Karkonosze cottage has stood beside it from the very start. It is the best place in Jelenia Góra to understand how this region lived and why glass became its calling card.

History: from a hiking club to a glass museum

The collection was started by the Riesengebirgsverein (RGV), the Giant Mountains Society, founded on 1 August 1880 on the initiative of Theodor Donat. Its members built trails and mountain huts, and their gifts – travel diaries, books, objects – gave rise to a library and a museum that opened on 2 June 1889 in a school building. For 34 years the curator was Hugo Seydel, a retired judge and RGV president who passionately collected glass, woodcarving and craft memorabilia.

Seydel was the driving force behind the present building. He rejected other architects' designs and commissioned Carl Grosser, born in nearby Kowary; construction began on 3 June 1912 and the museum opened on 14 April 1914. Seydel ran it until his death in 1932 at the age of 92 – a street next to the museum and a mountain trail to Szrenica bear his name.

After the war, when the region became part of Poland, the museum was briefly named after the painter Jan Matejko: on 7 August 1945 Professor Stanisław Lorentz deposited crates of recovered Matejko paintings here. Since 1964 the museum has specialised in art glass, and the collection owes its standing above all to Mieczysław Buczyński, who worked here for 38 years. It has carried its current name since 2001.

What to see

• The Mieczysław Buczyński Art Glass Exhibition – 17th- and 18th-century pieces from the Preussler glassworks, glass from the Josephine works in Szklarska Poręba, works by Émile Gallé and the Daum brothers, and Tiffany's iridescent plate.
• The Glass Laboratory – how glass is made and decorated.
• The Karkonosze cottage – modelled on a Sudeten farmhouse from the second half of the 18th century and built in 1913 from timber from Count Schaffgotsch's forests. Seydel collected the furnishings himself; the main room has a tiled stove brought from the village of Zachełmie.
• "Homeland lost, homeland found" – the story of the region and its people before and after 1945, when the German population was replaced by Polish settlers.
• The burgher's house exhibition, the archaeology display and a gallery on early modern history and the 19th century.

Opening hours and tickets (as of October 2026)

• October to March: Tuesday–Sunday 9:00–16:00, ticket office until 15:30; April to September Tuesday–Sunday 9:00–17:00. Closed on Mondays.
• Standard ticket PLN 20, reduced PLN 15; groups of more than 10 PLN 15/10 per person.
• Permanent exhibitions are free on Wednesdays; the temporary exhibition then costs PLN 10.
• Guided tour in English or German: PLN 150 per group.

Tripto tip

Allow 1.5–2 hours, most of it for the glass. If your plans are flexible, come on a Wednesday and save on permanent-exhibition tickets. The address is Jana Matejki 28 – easy to combine with a stroll through the old town, and on a rainy day it is one of the best addresses in the Jelenia Góra Valley.