National Museum in Kraków

Stand for a moment on the wide pavement of Third of May Avenue. Traffic runs behind you, and somewhere past the trees lies the open green of the Błonia meadow. In front of you rises a long, pale building with clean lines and very little decoration. After the Gothic spires and baroque domes of the Old Town, it can feel almost severe. That quiet surface is deliberate, and what it holds inside is anything but quiet.

This is the Main Building of the National Museum in Kraków. Before we go in, here is the first surprise. This museum is older than the modern Polish state. It was founded in 1879, when Poland did not exist on the map. The country had been divided between three neighbouring empires. Kraków sat inside the Austrian part, which allowed more cultural freedom than the other two.

In that setting, a museum called national was a bold statement. It said that a people without a state still had a shared memory worth keeping. The city council created the institution, and artists and collectors began to give it their work. The best-known founding gift came from the painter Henryk Siemiradzki. He donated a huge canvas called Nero's Torches, which shows early Christians burned in the gardens of the Roman emperor.

That painting still hangs in the museum's first home. Most visitors walk past this home without realising it. It is the upper floor of the Cloth Hall, the long Renaissance market building in the centre of the Main Square. Downstairs, traders sell amber and wooden toys. Upstairs, under skylights, hangs a gallery of nineteenth-century Polish painting. It includes large historical scenes by Jan Matejko, among them his Prussian Homage.

So the museum is not one building at all. It is a family of sites spread across the city. Besides this Main Building and the Cloth Hall gallery, there is the Czartoryski Museum, the Bishop Erazm Ciołek Palace, and the former homes of the artists Jan Matejko and Józef Mehoffer. Each branch has its own character. If you only have one afternoon, it helps to know which collection you most want to see.

Now, back to the building in front of you. Work on it began in the 1930s, when independent Poland wanted a modern home for its growing collections. Then the Second World War stopped everything. Kraków survived the war with far less physical damage than Warsaw, but the museum's plans were set back for many years. The building was finished in stages over the following decades, which partly explains its plain, functional look.

Near the entrance, look for the bronze figure of Stanisław Wyspiański. He was a painter, playwright, and designer, and one of the central figures of a movement called Young Poland. That movement flourished around 1900 and mixed national themes with the curving forms of Art Nouveau, the decorative style of that period. Wyspiański is almost a patron saint of Kraków's art world, so it suits him to stand guard here.

Inside, the permanent galleries of the Main Building usually focus on three areas. One is Polish art of the twentieth century. Another is arms and uniforms. The third is decorative arts, from goldwork to textiles. Displays rotate, and large temporary exhibitions often take over whole floors. Check the museum's own information on the day to see what is open.

The twentieth-century gallery is where many visitors slow down. You will likely meet the pastel portraits of Wyspiański, soft and intense at the same time. You may see the strange, symbolic paintings of Jacek Malczewski, full of chimeras and figures from folk belief. And you may find the work of Witkacy, an artist and writer who painted portraits under the influence of various substances and labelled them with codes. Here is the second surprise. Those codes noted exactly what he had taken.

The arms and uniforms gallery tells a different kind of story. Here are sabres, armour, and military dress from many centuries of Polish history. Pay attention to the detail on the metalwork and saddlery. Much of it was made for show as much as for battle. For a nobleman, a richly decorated sabre was a sign of status, worn at feasts and gatherings as well as in war.

One more name belongs in this guide. The museum's most famous painting is not in this building. It is Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, a portrait of a young woman holding a small white animal. For generations it belonged to the Czartoryski family collection. In 2016 the Polish state bought that collection, and it became part of the National Museum. Today the portrait hangs in the Czartoryski Museum in the Old Town, which reopened after a long renovation.

That purchase tells you something about this institution. It keeps growing, and it keeps changing shape. A museum founded to protect the memory of a divided country now cares for Italian Renaissance painting, Polish modernism, folk-inspired design, and contemporary exhibitions. The pale building in front of you is a kind of working warehouse for all of it, with conservation studios, archives, and storage behind the public rooms.

When you step back outside, take a slow look around. The avenue, the trees, the open meadow beyond — this part of Kraków feels very different from the crowded medieval streets. Notice how the museum sits on the edge of that green space, a little apart from the old centre. As you walk away, you might head toward the Main Square and climb the stairs of the Cloth Hall. There, under the skylights, the story you heard today first began.