Exhibition Dedicated to Fr. Walenty Gadowski

This intimate display in the hall of the Stanisław Fischer Museum in Bochnia recalled Fr. Walenty Gadowski, the priest who laid out the Orla Perć trail in the Tatras, and ran from 18 April to 20 September 2026.

Stanisław Fischer Museum in Bochnia on the exhibition (translated from the museum’s Polish description; no English page for this exhibition was found on the museum’s site):

Objects placed in two display cases (photographs, postcards, correspondence) introduce visitors to the figure of one of the notable personalities associated with Bochnia.

What to expect

The display consists of two cases with photographs, postcards and correspondence documenting the life and work of Fr. Walenty Gadowski. The exhibition is located in the museum’s entrance hall.

Tickets, opening hours, and current details are on the Stanisław Fischer Museum in Bochnia website .

Context

Fr. Walenty Gadowski (1861-1956) was born in Nowy Wiśnicz, a small town some ten kilometres from Bochnia, and died in Bochnia, where he is buried. Ordained a priest in 1884, he served as a vicar in Pilzno and Nowy Sącz before bishop Ignacy Łobos appointed him, at 26, professor of catechetics and pedagogy at the seminary in Tarnów in 1887. He is remembered far beyond the pulpit: between 1903 and 1906 he marked out and helped build the Orla Perć, the hardest waymarked trail in the Polish Tatras, and two decades later did the same for the Sokola Perć in the Pieniny range. 2026 stacks four anniversaries of his life at once - 165 years since his birth, 70 since his death, 120 since the Orla Perć and 100 since the Sokola Perć - which is why Bochnia’s PTTK hiking-club branch declared 2026 the Year of Fr. Gadowski and filled its calendar with talks about him.

Tickets and time

The display sits in the museum’s entrance hall, so there is no separate ticket for it - you see it on the way to the permanent exhibition. Regular admission is 20 PLN, reduced 15 PLN, a guided tour 30 PLN on top of the ticket (60 PLN per group of more than 15). Opening hours run Tuesday to Sunday, closed Mondays: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 10:00-15:30, Thursday 11:30-19:00, Saturday and Sunday 12:00-16:00, extended to 17:00 on summer weekends (May-September). Admission is free on Thursdays, though the museum’s site does not state whether that covers temporary displays as well as the permanent one - worth confirming at the desk if you are timing a visit around it. Allow ten to fifteen minutes for the two display cases themselves; pair the visit with the permanent collection, which takes an hour or more on its own. English on site: no English-language page or labels were found for this specific display - the photographs and postcards still carry visual interest without Polish, but the correspondence will not mean much without translation. Best for visitors already curious about Tatra mountaineering history or Bochnia’s local figures; casual passers-by can skip it without missing much.

After the show

The museum has not said whether the two cases travel on, or whether a catalogue was published. The objects came from the museum’s own holdings and from the Bochnia antiquarian bookshop “Filibe”, so they have most likely gone back to both. The Year of Fr. Walenty Gadowski, declared by Bochnia’s PTTK hiking-club branch, runs to the end of 2026, but the remaining talks happen outside the museum hall.

Two temporary shows are on at the museum now: “Horizontal Existence; Vertical Existence [Evolution - Involution]” by Piotr J. Figiel, a survey of almost forty years of his work, and “SZTUKA NOWA” (“New Art”) in the Galeria Zmienna, a minimal display of works by Andrzej Szewczyk, Sławomir Nitentel and Piotr Duda, all three donated to the museum’s collection. Dates and details are on the museum’s temporary exhibitions page , in Polish only; neither show has a page on this site yet.

Related shows elsewhere in the network:

• Jan Gryboś “In the Rhythm of the Old Village” at the open-air museum in Szymbark - folk sculpture from the Carpathian foothills, running to 14 November 2026, close in spirit to the folk-art rooms of the Bochnia museum’s permanent display.
• Inscribed in Time at the Zamość Museum - a regional museum’s centenary told through its own collection, for anyone whose interest in Bochnia was the local-museum history rather than the mountains.

No review of the display itself was found; two cases in an entrance hall rarely attract one. The local outlet Bochnianin.pl did cover the Year of Fr. Gadowski programme, including the museum lecture by Wojciech Pałka on Gadowski as a mountaineer and organiser of Tatra tourism (13 March 2026) - report, in Polish . The museum announced no attendance figures and no awards.

Museum profile: Stanisław Fischer Museum in Bochnia .