Muzeum Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego Collegium Maius
Gilded clockwork globe collection inside a fourteenth-century university hall, holding the oldest globe to name America.
This guide to the Collegium Maius, Kraków's oldest university building, opens with the rediscovery in the 1870s of a small gilded globe that turned out to be the oldest surviving globe to name America, made in France before 1510, less than two decades after Columbus's voyage. It traces the university's cabinets of instruments back to the 1490s, when a young student named Nicolaus Copernicus walked these same stone arcades, and to an astrolabe forged in Córdoba in 1054 that joined the collection the very year he is recorded here. Look for the astrolabe among the cabinets while you listen, its Arabic script forged four centuries before it ever reached this room.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.