A cast bronze coin belonging to the 2nd series of the Olbian “asses,” dated to the second half of the 5th century BC, is included in the collections of the Jagiellonian University Museum. The coin was probably added to the university collection in 1871, as a gift of Baron Edward Rastawiecki (1805–1874) for the archaeological unit. According to the donor, the “as” was found during the excavation of a barrow in the village of Ostrohladovich in Minsk province – currently Astrahlady/Astrahliady/Ostrogliade (Belarusian Астрагля́ды, Russian Острогляды) in Belarus in the Gomel region, in the Brahin district. In the first millennium BC this area was occupied by the Miłograd culture. Finds of coins produced in Olbia, in particular the Olbian “asses,” have not been recorded outside the Black Sea region until recently. In recent years, however, finds of early Olbian coins (known as “dolphins” and “asses”) have been recorded in the forest-steppe zone. These new discoveries give credence to the finding of the “as” from Ostrohladovich. The coin arrived in the area of the Miłograd culture probably via the Scythians.

In the 1870s, during renovation works in the crypts under the Wawel Cathedral, which were carried out in order to adapt them for visitors, a detailed inventory was created of the sarcophagi from the Royal Tombs. This documentation, which is now stored in the collections of the Jagiellonian University Museum, was initiated by Prof. Józef Łepkowski, a researcher of exceptional merit in the inventory and documentation of historical objects. Pencil drawings, watercolors and pencil frottages were made by Kraków painters and students of the School of Fine Arts. Each of the renovated coffins was meticulously documented in every detail and it also includes reproductions and frottages of memorial plaques. These materials constitute an invaluable base, both as an iconographic source for the art historian and for the conservator during conservation activities. They were used during the recent restoration and conservation of the metal royal sarcophagi carried out by the monument conservation workshop of Agnieszka and Tomasz Trzos. Analysis of the preserved iconographic sources collected by an art historian and of the material research performed by restorers permitted not only the reconstruction of the original color scheme of the royal sarcophagi, but also allowed the restoration of Sigismund II Augustus’ coffin to its primary form. The effects of this conservation work attest to the crucial role of a meticulously prepared documentation.

“The Golden Jagiellonian Globe” (early 16th century; in the collection of the Jagiellonian University Museum) is the earliest globe of the Earth in the Polish collections and one of the oldest in the world. The oldest known globe of the Earth was made by Martin Behaim in 1492. The second in order are two globes from the same period: the Hunt-Lenox Globe (c. 1510, now in the New York Public Library) and the Jagiellonian Globe. Despite its name, the Jagiellonian Globe is an astronomical instrument – a mechanical armillary sphere. On the orb hiding the mechanism there is a map of the Earth, dated 1510–1511. This object has been sparsely analysed, especially in the last decades. Those analysis that were performed have until now mainly focused on the depicted map and the typology of particular details, though there are also studies on its operation and provenance. Research performed in the 21st century focused on WWII history of the globe.A preliminary analysis of the sphere and the clock mechanism allows a connection with  French products from Blois near Paris. The map of the globe, associated with the Italian centre, presents information on geographical discoveries of the time, based on maps by Martin Waldseemüller and letters by Amerigo Vespucci, published in the edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (Saint-Dié, 1507). The map is a twin to the layout of the lands and seas depicted on Hunt-Lenox’s Globe. It is distinguished by a mysterious continent-island, noted on the Kraków globe as “America Noviter Reperta.” The provenance of the globe is known since the 17th century, when the Kraków professor, Jan Brożek, donated it to the Collegium Maius library of the Jagiellonian University. Its fate during World War II, when it was hidden from the Nazis by docent Jadwiga Schoen, is extraordinary. After the war, the globe found its way to the Jagiellonian University Museum, where it has been exhibited ever since.

The following article examines museums as meeting points, as open and inviting places for encounters and interactions, shaped by the presence of cultural assets, and thus offering not only physical-geographical but also temporal, emotional and mental spaces for diverse and complex exchange and reflection. These considerations build on the EU project REACH, which provided the opportunity to carry out extensive studies and activities on participatory initiatives in the field of cultural heritage. Cultural heritage institutions were an important pillar of this project and our contribution was focused in particular on museums. A short overview of our work and its guiding intellectual principles will be presented here together with the insights gained through our international workshop and during our survey. Even though the study included only a small sample, it could still highlight a very diverse range of activities and frameworks, and reveal the highly complex character of participatory activities, and of museums and their work. Furthermore, the societal relevance of historico-cultural collections and the multidimensional value of interaction could be underlined. By relating these findings to the current debate on the institution of museum, it has been possible to reflect on the changes that museums are undergoing as a result of the altering attitudes, knowledge, experiences, behaviour and expectations both among the public and within the institutions themselves. In addition, it was of special concern to accentuate the need of modified framework conditions and of multilateral commitments and responsibilities. With this article, I would like to contribute to the ongoing debate on the further development of museums and to promote a rather simple and open form of their understanding and development as meeting points.

This paper presents a general view of a proposal for a digital reinterpretation of a collection of scientific instruments belonging to the Physics Cabinet of the Science Museum of the University of Coimbra. In this cataloging, the local and global aspects of each instrument are inventoried and represented by a semantic network of concepts, facts, ideas, and narratives, resulting in a knowledge base about scientific physics instruments. This knowledge base will be made available to students, researchers, and the general public through a mobile phone application. The article also offers a review of the transformations of the conceptual models of material culture studies related to scientific instruments and adds some contributions to this field of study.

The article reconstructs the history of the Museum of Tropical Medicine of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, created by Giuseppe Franchini, professor of Colonial Pathology, who moved from Bologna to Modena in 1930. At the University of Modena, thanks to the financial support of the city authorities, Franchini was able to give adequate accommodation to the Museum, unique in Italy1 and of great international importance, which was expanding and acquiring specimens from various parts of the world.

The history of the Museum is related to their transfers and rearrangements: the reconstruction of its history is an indispensable first step of a modern and engaging setting up which should mainly valorize the scientific and multidisciplinary context of the collections, with specific reference to the studies and researches on tropical medicine, parasitology and also on the infectious diseases that the Covid pandemic has made very topical all over the world.

Secondly, the rearrangement of the Museum should be an opportunity to critically present the historical context that was decisive for the realization and progressive expansion of this museum which, alongside the laboratories, was part of the educational infrastructure available to doctors, veterinarians, nurses, and missionaries active in the Italian colonies during the Fascist regime as well as in the Modena University Clinic. Another aspect that should not be overlooked is that the Museum also served the propaganda of the Fascist colonial policy, supported by the leader Benito Mussolini, in particularly to safeguard the health of the people who worked in the African continent. Lastly, the Museum’s reorganization should aid a reinterpretation of the multicultural contexts, by giving a voice to new citizens and to heterogeneous communities by facilitating their social inclusion through direct dialogues and common initiatives.

The Museum’s redevelopment project could be part of a larger endeavor, Ago Modena Fabbriche Culturali (www.agomodena.it), funded by the Modena Foundation, which envisages the redevelopment for cultural purposes of the entire large area of the complex of buildings called Sant’ Agostino and in particular the relocation of some University Museums to the buildings overlooking Berengario street built by the University of Modena between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to house University Medical Institutes Clinics.

This article discusses Baublys – a nineteenth-century garden pavilion in Lithuania, Samogitia, established in the trunk of an oak tree by Lithuanian boyar and writer Dionizas Poška. Because of its ambiguity, Baublys has attracted considerable scholarly attention and, for the same reason, remains forgotten, generating a relatively small number of texts. Although interpretations vary, the place of Baublys in Lithuanian culture is still unclear. What is it? Is it a regional curiosity or a proto-museum? This article looks at Baublys through its function and aims at demonstrating that Baublys is not only a proto-museum, but also a prototype of today’s interactive museum, containing the analogues of modern practices of museology: interactivity, communicational features and performativity. My methodology is constructed invoking the conceptual metaphor of the mask and referring to the theories of Hans Belting and Mikhail Bakhtin. According to the Bakhtinian dialogic imagination and literary concepts of the epic and the novel, the analogy of the mask and the monument is used. The research question is what Baublys does as a mask during Poška’s lifetime and what it does as a monument today. How did its semantics and agency change after “becoming” a monument? The article shows that for Poška Baublys is a theatre of historical and personal memory, activated by structure, a set of finds, analogues (Sibile Temple, other garden pavilions) and performance. An empty Baublys is a monument – a reference to the past, which lacks the collection of the museum – Poška’s finds. Baublys is not only a museum, but might be perceived as a monument to museums, even a monument to the idea of a museum.

After 1700 we observe a clear increase in the number of conscious collectors gathering works of art, naturalia and various curiosities – mirabilia, typical of many Baroque “chambers” (Kammer) that were created by collectors during the previous, 17th century. Michael Bernhard Valentini (1657–1729), court physician at the court of the Landgrave of Hessen, published a compendium of encyclopaedic knowledge, a work for academic collectors of natural history specimens, entitled Museum museorum (Vol. I–II, Frankfurt am Main 1704–1714). Valentini provided information about various noteworthy things found in the Old and New World as well as in Asia (India), sometimes exceeding the limits of previous knowledge, both for researchers and collectors. Valentini’s work may be seen as evidence of a real collector’s fever, directed not only at all kinds of rare and curious things (curiosities) but also research objects collected for study purposes, especially in countries north of the Alps (e.g. natural amber and amber with insect inclusions). This German author recommended in his proposed programme for the creation of an ideal modern museum that objects should be arranged into groups, for example naturalia and artificialia and then divided into more detailed subgroups in order to make them more visible and their content more comprehensible, therefore enriching the knowledge of the surrounding world.

This article concerns medicinal preparations from the first European pharmacopoeia listed on the cartouches of apothecary majolica vessels (16th‒18th century) from the Grabowski collection at the Museum of Pharmacy in Kraków. The materials for comparison are three 16th-century works: Ricettario Fiorentino (1550), Pharmacopoea by J. Placotomus (1560) and Dispensatorium by V. Cordus (1563). The inscriptions on the apothecary jars for which they were meant comprise greatly important information carriers about medicine in the old days. Their deciphering can also be helpful when dating these objects.

Interdisciplinary studies on the role of plants in culture are rare, that is why a rich plant ornamentation of the churches in Poland is little known. This article presents the first documentation of the plant ornaments in nine Roman Catholic churches of Kiełczygłów Community and surroundings in Łódź Voivodeship, which were built from the 16th into the 20th centuries. The first stage of work was to take 385 photographs, then to organize a basis with 505 records, one record containing one plant ornament. As a result of botanical analysis 39 taxa were determined, including 17 species, 18 genera, and 4 families. Some of the plant motifs could not be identified because of strong stylization. The most frequent taxa were the old useful plants popular in sacral art, originating in southern or south-eastern regions of Europe and in West Asia: bear’s-breech (Acanthus sp1.), rose (Rosa sp.), Madonna lily (Lilium candidum L.), and grape-vine (Vitis vinifera L.). Some ornaments present the plants occurring in wild in Poland or as field and meadow weeds, e.g. bellflower (Campanula sp.) or poppy (Papaver sp.). The greatest number of ornaments was identified in the neo-Gothic St. Casimir Church in Osjaków. Captivating in their colors and diversity of shapes, the plant ornaments serve not only decorative functions, but symbolic ones as well. This article hopes to contribute, at least to a small extent, to the reflection on the presence of plants in our culture and to raise the awareness of how important it is to protect local species that perish irretrievably due to anthropogenic activity.

Since 2015, the Jagiellonian University Museum has regularly partnered with the Jagiellonian University of the Third Age (JUTA) by organizing lectures for seniors on selected issues concerning the history and collections of the university. The author of this paper extensively surveyed the attendees to evaluate how much information they were able to remember. To illustrate the absorption of knowledge by seniors, the questionnaires were analyzed in terms of three questions: (1) Did most of the respondents obtain a positive (i.e. good or highly satisfactory) or negative (unsatisfactory) result? (2) Which result (unsatisfactory, good, or highly satisfactory) did the largest number of respondents achieve? (3) What was the ratio of unsatisfactory to highly satisfactory results? The questionnaires highlighted the strongest points of the program, but also its shortcomings. Based on them, we can conclude that the lectures make a lot of sense, enriching the JUTA students with knowledge bordering on popular science as well as specialist knowledge. An important benefit of the study is feedback for those preparing and delivering the lectures.