Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum

This guide to the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Kraków opens in 1939, when staff at a small museum of peasant costumes and folk art made a wartime bet to hide the collection from the occupying forces rather than surrender it. It traces back further, to the schoolteacher Seweryn Udziela, who began gathering embroidered shirts, carved sleighs and clay figures from regional villages around 1900, once storing the overflow in his own apartment before opening three borrowed rooms in 1911.