The Secret Chambers of the People's Authorities

An exhibition about the luxury apartments fitted out in the Royal Castle, then under reconstruction, for foreign guests of the communist authorities. From 2 October 2026 to 17 January 2027.

The Royal Castle in Warsaw on the exhibition:

Every castle hides a secret. For years little was said about the luxury apartments in the Royal Castle in Warsaw intended for foreign guests of the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic. The project was never realised, but its story says a great deal about the political ambitions of Edward Gierek’s team. It also reveals the competing visions of the Castle’s future - a building so important to Poles, at the time being rebuilt from wartime ruins. Today we tell this little-known episode in the form of an exhibition.

The 1970s: the Royal Castle stands once more on its foundations. It is to become a museum of Polish history and culture, ready to receive thousands, millions of visitors. In part of its interiors, however, a space intended for particular guests is taking shape. Reception rooms, banqueting halls, marble bathrooms, dressing rooms, kitchens, cold stores, lifts and extensive back-of-house facilities are to serve the highest-ranking figures visiting the country.

The idea clashes with the vision of the circle gathered around Professors Stanisław Lorentz, Jan Zachwatowicz and Aleksander Gieysztor, who had been working for years towards the building’s restitution. For five years, competing ideas about the use of a place that is such an important symbol of Polish history and statehood are at odds: is it to serve everyone, or only a few? Beyond the Castle walls, however, an economic and political crisis is deepening, and as a result the authorities finally abandon the idea, and not one VIP ever crosses the threshold of the exclusive interiors.

Today we are recreating a fragment of the project abandoned years ago. The spaces once intended as an enclave of luxury for the chosen few will be arranged in line with the surviving designs and purchase lists. Furniture, lamps, textiles, art glass and decorative objects, dispersed for years across the Castle’s stores and offices, will return to the context for which they were chosen.

The exhibition will also present photographs by Chris Niedenthal, one of Europe’s foremost photojournalists, who documented Polish reality at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. They show the Castle during its reconstruction - still unfinished, full of people absorbed in their work. Most of them have not been published before.

What to expect

The museum invites visitors to look into apartments arranged for guests who never arrived.

Tickets and opening hours are on the museum’s website.

Museum profile: The Royal Castle in Warsaw.