Museum of Archeology and Ethnography - the largest museum in
Łódź, located at Plac Wolności 14. At the end of 2012, it had
260,354 catalog items.
In the museum you can see three
permanent exhibitions: ethnographic, numismatic and archaeological.
The history of the museum dates back to the interwar period, when in
1918 the City Museum in Łódź was established. It gathered various
collections in the broad sense of culture. In the following years, the
museum changed its seat and official name several times, until the turn
of 1949/1950, when the Municipal Prehistoric Museum (operating from May
14, 1945), headed by prof. Konrad Jażdżewski and the Municipal
Ethnographic Museum (operating since April 20, 1945), led by Dr. Janina
Krajewska, were nationalized and took the names: the Archaeological
Museum and the Ethnographic Museum in Łódź. At the same time, from 1948,
the Numismatic Cabinet, founded as part of the Archaeological Museum by
Anatol Gupieniec, began to develop.
On January 1, 1956, all units
were merged into one Museum of Archeology and Ethnography in Łódź, whose
management was entrusted to prof. dr. hab. Konrad Jażdżewski, and since
then the headquarters has been invariably located in Łódź at Plac
Wolności 14.
The Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum in Łódź
includes the following departments: Archaeology, Ethnography,
Numismatics, Puppet shows, Scientific and educational, Conservation and
research on monuments. There is also a library in the museum.
The
Museum publishes numerous book publications and a permanent
multi-sectional journal, Works and Materials of the Archaeological and
Ethnographic Museum in Łódź (archaeological, ethnographic, numismatic
and conservation series).
After the efforts made by Łódź factory owners from the early 1840s to create a district school in Łódź, in 1845 a four-class real school was opened, the so-called German-Russian in the rented house of Jakub Peters on the New Town Square at the left corner of Legionów Street. For the needs of the school, in 1856, a one-story building of the Real German-Russian District School was put into use. The building, rebuilt several times, housed the Higher School of Crafts from 1869, and in the interwar period the building was used by the city magistrate, to be taken over by the museum after World War II.