Grand opening of the Shipwreck Conservation Centre!

On Saturday, 2 July, we would like to invite you to the opening of the Tczew Shipwreck Conservation Centre. On that day, admission to the new branch of the National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk will be free, and museum staff will guide visitors around the facility.

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Built in 2016, CKWS is one of the few places in the country where you can watch museum conservators at work, learn about the history of Polish sailing and find out how boats and ships used to be built. – We are glad that after more than two years we are inviting the most important guests, i.e. visitors, to our new facility – says Szymon Kulas, deputy director of the National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk – Visitors’ opinions are extremely important to us, so we will be waiting for reviews on 2 July.

World-class maintenance

Three years ago, in the place where the walls of the new branch stand today, the Museum’s conservation workshop was located. At that time, conservators from the then Polish Maritime Museum worked in difficult conditions, inside buildings and temporary warehouses of the former factory workshops. Today, the museum specialists have a modern and well-equipped workplace at their disposal. Workshops: blacksmith’s and locksmith’s, as well as boatbuilding and carpentry workshops, make it possible to carry out reconstruction work, while mobile platforms and an overhead crane facilitate the transportation of large relics. “We have one of the best equipment in the industry,” says Irena Rodzik, head of the Museum Collections Conservation Department.

Open storage

A fragment of the side, a 16-metre-long keel, an anchor and part of the cargo from the 15th-century wreck called the “Copper Ship” are among the most important exhibits in the study warehouse. The CKWS collection includes structural elements of shipwrecks, medieval hulls, boats, including exotic ones, and canoes. The sliding shelves present relics from the NMM’s underwater research. Historic yachts tell the story of Polish yachting. On “Opty” Leonid Teliga, as the first Pole, circumnavigated the earth alone. “Dal”, in the 1930s, under the command of Andrzej Bohomolc, made a pioneering voyage across the Atlantic, and “Kumka IV” has a unique welded construction.

Educating about wrecks

The Shipwreck Conservation Centre is also an educational institution. “We offer a wide range of events and classes and workshops with the use of interactive educational stands. We are sure that the stand with the steerable underwater robot will be very popular,” says Przemysław Węgrzyn, the deputy head of the NMM Education Department. “We are close to the idea of an open museum, which is why we want close cooperation between educators and teachers, whom we will invite to regular meetings and workshops,” adds Przemysław Węgrzyn.

Expanding reality

One of the attractions of the Shipwreck Conservation Centre, which is also used in educational activities, is augmented reality (AR) – a technology used by cultural institutions around the world. Using the mobile application “Yachts and Wrecks” – a virtual guide to the CKWS – you can watch multimedia presentations about historic yachts and Baltic shipwrecks. Educational games allow you to play the role of a captain of a great passenger ship, a raftsman floating grain or a boatbuilder building a medieval sailing ship.

The Shipwreck Conservation Centre in Tczew will be open from Monday to Sunday from 10.00 to 16.00.
Tickets will cost – 4 zł (concessionary) and 6 zł (normal).

The project “Shipwreck Conservation Centre with a Studio Warehouse in Tczew” is implemented under the programme “Preservation and Revitalisation of Cultural Heritage” and has been supported by the Norwegian and EEA funds from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway as well as by national funds. The total cost of the project is PLN 22 million. The task is implemented in Polish-Norwegian partnership with the Norwegian Maritime Museum in Oslo and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo.

Source: nmm.pl