Museum of Nature in Drozdowo

In this manor house above the Narew river, nine-year-old Witold Lutosławski wrote his first piano piece, and Roman Dmowski, one of the founders of modern Poland, spent the last months of his life and died on 2 January 1939. Today the former seat of the Lutosławski landowning family houses the Museum of Nature, where family memorabilia sit alongside white-tailed eagles, elk from the Biebrza marshes and piranhas in aquariums representing six continents.

The Lutosławski manor

The Lutosławski family settled in Drozdowo in the late 18th century. The estate flourished most under Franciszek Dionizy Lutosławski (1830–1891), who founded a brewery here, one of the largest in the country, shipping beer to Berlin, Moscow and St Petersburg among other cities, and funded the parish church designed by Witold Lanci. The manor consists of a lower, cottage-style part recalling an 18th-century larch-wood building, and a classicising villa of 1895 designed by Franciszek Lilpop.

After 1945 the communist authorities, unusually, allowed the last heiress, Maria Niklewicz née Lutosławska, to stay in the manor until almost the end of the 1970s. For a time part of the building was leased to the Łomża hospital as a maternity ward. The museum was founded in 1984; the manor is surrounded by a park of about 3 ha with a hornbeam avenue protected as a natural monument and a lime avenue.

What to see

• The aquarium exhibition opened in 2025: 21 tanks, fish from six continents and more than 70 species, including piranhas, the blind cave fish and a lungfish that can survive drought in a cocoon of mucus and mud.
• "Herbal Secrets": 80 species of medicinal plants from the Narew valley and a herbalist's hut.
• Birds and mammals of the Biebrza Basin: white-tailed eagle, golden eagle, wolf, lynx and elk.
• Historical exhibitions on the Lutosławskis, the landed gentry and Roman Dmowski, a friend of the family from 1900.

The museum is building a new nature pavilion; new exhibitions are due to open at the end of 2026 or early 2027. Some of the specimens from the current Biebrza Basin display will move there.

Practical information (as of October 2026)

• Hours: Monday–Friday 08:00–16:00, Saturday–Sunday 10:00–16:00; closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas and Easter, New Year's Day, Corpus Christi and All Saints' Day, among others.
• Tickets: standard PLN 11, reduced PLN 9, children under 7 PLN 5, family PLN 25; with a guide PLN 15/13. On Mondays (except holidays) visits without a guide are free.
• Address: ul. Główna 38, 18-421 Piątnica Poduchowna; tel. +48 86 219 20 81.

Tripto tip

Allow 1.5–2 hours for the exhibitions, and come on a Monday if you want free entry. Afterwards, walk through the park and then visit the nearby parish church of 1878 and the Lutosławski family chapel in the cemetery, the two other traces of the family in Drozdowo.