Museum of Postal and Telecommunication of Wroclaw

Museum of Postal and Telecommunication of Wroclaw

From the internet review, Museum of Postal and Telecommunication of Wroclaw is very tourist-friendly – because there is English description of the exhibits! However, it is not very tourist-friendly when finding the entrance of the museum. It locates at a building with a post office and a bank. Tourists can find the building easily as there is a big banner showing it. However, you are not sure whether the entrance you are looking at is the entrance of the museum or not. There is a post office on the ground floor of the building. If you want to send postcards to your friend and you struggle to find a post office in Wroclaw, you can post them when you visit this museum! Go inside the building and go straight to the 1^st Floor as the museum entrance locates there.

When you enter the entrance, you should buy your ticket at the ticket office on your right hand side. Remember the Polish word “Kasa” – it means the cashier where you can buy your tickets. You should look for it whenever you visit a museum in Poland. If you visit the museum during weekdays and day time, sometime there is no one staying in Kasa as they will walk around and relax. Just tell them you want to buy the ticket and they are more than happy to help you! You can also get a small leaflet which contains the floor plan and the opening hours of the museum at the ticket office for free. Although only Polish version is available, it is adequate for tourists to know how to travel within the museum.

There are three major parts in the museum: postal-related exhibits, Telecommunication-related exhibits and temporary exhibits. Just like all other temporary exhibitions in museums in Wroclaw, there is no English at all, not even the name of the exhibits. When I visited this museum, there is a co-exhibition by this museum and Mineralogy Museum

showing the mineral and stone. There is also another temporary exhibition showing the stamps of other European countries. However, you can understand the stamps as everybody understand pictures without English!

For the telecommunication-related exhibition, it shows a lot of old devices like teleprinters, telephones etc.

However, the tourists may be a bit confused in this part of the museum. Although there is English description available, you can notice that the description in Polish is 3 times longer than that in English. English description is only a summary. You may spot that in the past there were teleprinters especially designed for Polish as there are Polish alphebats buttons on it. However, as the technology progresses, the devices used by Polish is not specailly designed for Polish anymore -- Everybody in the world used English keyboard.

For the Postal-related exhibition, it locates in the first room opposite to the Kasa. It shows the history of postal service in Poland generally. From the exhibits you may find some interesting facts. For example, during World War II, the postal office employees were engaged by the Signal Corps of regular Polish Army. One of the actions that Nazi soldiers took once they invaded Poland is to attack Post Offices. With the prevalence of Internet nowadays, it is hard to imagine once the Post office in Poland bore such an important role in society. When you finish visiting all the exhibitions, you should visit the rooms next to the KASA to have a look at the Postal Stamp collection of Poland. It stated in this room that postage stamp can be used as political usage. After the January Uprising, Russian used postage stamps as one of the means to show its righteousness of governance over Poland. The stamps used in 1865 serves as a tool for Tsarist rulers for political repression. Also, during German occuption the stamps orginally used in Poland lost its validity as well. All in all, the room shows the stamp collection of Poland from 1860 to 2009.

After you have visited all the exhibitions on the 1st floor, don't forget to visit the Room Stagecoaches which showes the cargos used by the postal office in the past. It locates on the ground floor and maybe the door is locked when there is not many visitors in the museum. You may ask the staff to open the room for you. There are not only old cargos inside but also some radio and television devices used in the past. Without visiting this museum, you will not notice that ordinary postal service bears such social, political and historical meanings.