Nowa Huta Underground - os. Szkolne 37

What to expect

Nowa Huta Underground at os. Szkolne 37 has almost nothing in display cases, and that is the point. You walk in through the front door of a working school, follow arrows painted on the floor, take the stairs down, and end up in a genuine 1950s air-raid shelter under the building. The permanent exhibition “Stan zagrożenia” (State of Emergency) leaves the place as it is: narrow corridors, low ceilings, air filters, tight emergency exits. The discomfort is deliberate.

What the exhibition adds is a line of argument rather than a collection. Curated by Agata Klimek-Zdeb, it asks where the instinct to hide from danger comes from, and surveys the most striking shelter structures built around the world, from camouflaged bunkers to full fortresses. There is a model of a standard shelter, a short film about present-day fears and what survival would actually demand, and a room of questions aimed straight at the visitor.

What you will not get here is the history of Nowa Huta itself. That is told at the project’s other address, os. Szkolne 22, where the main exhibition covers the district’s own shelter network. Several hundred of them were poured together with the housing blocks in the 1950s, because the new town and a nationwide civil-defence programme started in the same years.

This shelter was the first one opened on the route and remains the smaller, quieter half of it; the main exhibition at os. Szkolne 22 only opened in June 2026.

Who it suits: anyone drawn to the Cold War, civil defence, or the architecture of Nowa Huta, and anyone who wants the physical sensation of a real shelter rather than a reconstruction. Children under about ten will get little out of it. Skip it if you are claustrophobic - the corridors are cramped and the emergency exits more so. Access is by stairs; there is no lift, and the museum’s visiting rules state that access for visitors with reduced mobility is limited.

Tips

• Do os. Szkolne 22 first and come here second. The main exhibition explains the district’s shelter network, which is what most people actually come for. The two addresses are about 300 m apart, with separate entrances, but a ticket for either exhibition covers one entry to the other within 7 days of purchase.
• Allow 45 minutes, or an hour if you watch the film and read everything. Budget two hours for both shelters together.
• Wednesday is free, but the passes are limited. Collect one in advance at bilety.muzeumkrakowa.pl instead of relying on the desk on the day.
• The afternoon window is shorter than the 17:00 closing suggests. Last entry is 30 minutes before closing for individuals and 60 minutes before closing for guided groups.
• Bring a layer, especially in summer. The shelter stays cool all year, so a July visit needs a jacket that a January one does not.
• Language: assume Polish. The museum does not state that the captions carry an English version, so check when you buy.
• The 220 PLN guided tour is priced per group, not per person, so it only pays off for a larger party - not for two.
• Look for a school door, not a museum facade. The ticket desk is inside the school building; there is no separate entrance and no signage visible from across the estate.
• The model shelter and the survey of shelter types are the part to slow down for - they are what lifts the visit above “a corridor under a school”.

Getting there

By tram: from the centre, take a tram towards Nowa Huta and get off at Zalew Nowohucki on ul. Kocmyrzowska. From there it is under 200 m, two to three minutes on foot. The next stop, Struga, leaves you about 300 m away.

On foot from Plac Centralny: 10-12 minutes along aleja Róż and into the estate. From the Main Market Square, the whole journey including the walk runs to roughly half an hour.

By car: there is parking directly in front of the school.

The entrance sits under a portico of six doubled columns - the main door of the former No. 3 Mechanical Schools Complex, designed by Jan Suliga in the 1950s. The Szkolne estate went up between 1950 and 1955, so the shelter below is exactly as old as the school above it.

Nearby

Nowa Huta Underground at os. Szkolne 22 is the other half of the same route and the exhibition the museum recommends starting with - five minutes’ walk, on the same ticket within 7 days of purchase. The Nowa Huta Museum in the former Światowid cinema on Plac Centralny supplies what the shelter deliberately leaves out: the district’s story above ground. On the tram back towards the centre, get off in Czyżyny for the Polish Aviation Museum . It holds one of Europe’s largest aircraft collections and fills the rest of a day spent on this side of Krakow.