Nowa Huta Underground - os. Szkolne 22

What to expect

The point of this visit is in the basement of an ordinary apartment block: two pairs of gas-tight doors, a filter-ventilation chamber that was meant to supply cleaned air, a water tank, and the rooms where the people living upstairs were supposed to sit out a nuclear attack. Everything on the floors above exists to explain why that is there.

Nowa Huta was laid out from nothing in 1949 as a model socialist city, and between 1953 and 1960 more than 250 air-raid shelters went in with it - in the steelworks, in public buildings, under residential blocks. That density is the result of timing rather than paranoia alone: the shelters and the city were designed at the same drawing boards. The permanent exhibition here, “Schrony w Nowej Hucie - dziedzictwo zimnej wojny” (Shelters in Nowa Huta - a Cold War Legacy), opened in June 2026 under curator Agata Klimek-Zdeb and occupies three spaces on two levels plus the shelter itself.

The sequence is deliberate. First the context - how the district was built and what the Cold War felt like from here. Then how the shelters were engineered. Only then do you go down. The single best object is a map of shelter locations across the district: local residents use it to look up their own block, visitors use it to grasp how much of the estate they just walked across is hollow underneath. Alongside it are archival photographs, film footage and original shelter equipment.

The display does not stop in 1960. Its last section deals with present-day civil protection - evacuation backpacks, what to do in a crisis - and asks you directly about your own experience of feeling unsafe. There is a separate children’s route on everyday safety led by two comic characters, a turtle and a squirrel. The tone throughout is matter-of-fact rather than alarming, which is the right call.

Two planning notes. This is the main site of the two-part Nowa Huta Underground project; the sibling shelter at os. Szkolne 37 shows something different, and the museum itself advises starting here. And while the former Światowid cinema is being rebuilt, this building also houses the Museum of Nowa Huta - so if you came looking for “the Nowa Huta museum”, this is where you will find staff rather than scaffolding.

Tips

• Allow an hour inside, and about three hours door to door from the Old Town if you want both shelters.
• Wednesday is free. Tickets go online at bilety.muzeumkrakowa.pl and are also handed out at the desk on the day, subject to availability. Book online anyway - free slots run out.
• Last entry is 16:30 for individual visitors, 16:00 for guided groups. Turning up at 16:45 means not getting in.
• Check the language question before you go. The museum publishes no guarantee of English labels on this exhibition; call +48 12 446 78 21 or write to schrony@muzeumkrakowa.pl , and ask about an English-speaking guide at the same time.
• Access for visitors with reduced mobility is limited. This branch’s own visiting rules state that access is limited for visitors with mobility impairments - there is no lift, and wheelchair users cross the change of level on a platform. Ask by phone before travelling out here.
• Bring a layer. The shelter is a cellar and runs noticeably cooler than the street, which matters most in summer.
• Leave the big bag behind: backpacks over 30 litres are not admitted. Personal photography is fine; photo sessions and commercial shots need the museum’s consent.
• A guided tour costs 260 PLN per group and a walking tour of Nowa Huta’s shelter heritage 390 PLN. Neither is required for individual visitors - the exhibition reads well on its own.

Getting there

By tram: take any tram signed for Plac Centralny, Nowa Huta’s monumental central square, or get off at the Struga stop, then walk 8-10 minutes north into the older estates. The walk through the socialist-realist blocks is the best possible introduction to the exhibition, because those blocks and these shelters were built at the same time.

On foot from Plac Centralny: roughly a kilometre along the avenues between the estates. Building 22 stands inside os. Szkolne; the entrance leads to the ground-floor galleries and then down to the shelter.

From the city centre: allow about 30 minutes of travel from the main railway station area. Nowa Huta is well outside the Old Town walking radius, so treat this as a half-day excursion, not a detour.

Nearby

Nowa Huta Underground at os. Szkolne 37 is the second half of the same project, a few minutes away in a shelter under a school; its exhibition “Stan zagrożenia” (State of Emergency) covers the human instinct to take cover and notable shelters worldwide, so it does not repeat what you saw here.

Nowa Huta Museum in the former Światowid cinema tells the story of the district as a whole - but check its page before setting out, because the building is closed for renovation.

Polish Aviation Museum sits on your way back to the centre, in Czyżyny, with one of Europe’s largest aircraft collections on a former airfield. It is the natural second stop on this side of the city.