Landmark
City Arsenal
A listed Gothic arsenal on Cieszyńskiego Street, now one of the four seats of the City Museum, with the weapons collection and the archaeology collection inside it.
What it is
The Arsenal is a listed Gothic building at 9 Antoniego Cieszyńskiego Street, at the north-west edge of the old town. The City Museum of Wrocław has seven branches and four buildings to put them in — the Old Town Hall, the Royal Palace, the old Jewish cemetery and this one — and the Arsenal holds two of the seven.
The museum describes the building it occupies as a defensive one and a former weapons store, and the collection inside as a continuation of that. Beyond that, the building's own history is harder to state than it looks: the chronology everyone repeats, down to the year each wing was raised, traces to a single source, and so does the account of what survived 1945. Neither is on this page for that reason.
The weapons museum
Muzeum Militariów shows its collection in four permanent exhibitions: early weapons, firearms, edged weapons, and the uniform and headgear of the Polish soldier of 1939–1945. The edged-weapons rooms are the ones people come back for — sabres carried by warriors from the east, among them a seventeenth-century Turkish kilić with Arabic lettering on the blade — and the firearms run from Mosins and Mausers to pieces that exist in very few collections.
Tomasz Gąsior Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
The archaeology museum
Muzeum Archeologiczne is in the same building, and it is much older than the museum that now owns it. It was founded in 1815 out of private and church collections by J.G.G. Büsching, which makes it one of the oldest institutions of its kind in Europe. What it holds is Silesia: finds from the region running from the stone age to the nineteenth century.
Seeing it
Both museums keep the same hours: Wednesday to Saturday 11.00–17.00, and Sunday 10.00–18.00. A full ticket is 15–20 zł and a reduced one 10–15 zł.
The museum states that Muzeum Militariów is not adapted for visitors with limited mobility, and that Muzeum Archeologiczne is only partly adapted. That is the museum's own statement and there is no second source for it, so it is worth telephoning ahead.