Amber Collection at North Masovian Museum in Lomza

Jerzy Jastrzebski *

In 1946, Adam Chętnik began to establish the Museum in Lomza, taking special care in the organising of its amber department. In a relatively short time, he collected over 700 exhibits which included not only amber itself, but also other objects which broaden our knowledge about amber, explain how it formed, where it came from, its travels, extraction, processing and use .

On 10 April 1950, a temporary exhibition opened in Lomza which was the first one to present amber in Poland. The exhibition continued until October 5, 1950 and presented some 500 different exhibits together with illustrations, graphs and maps. “Amber terminology (for the raw material, amber-bearing earth, processing, etc.) is almost completely based on a certain form of folk geology, and most of all comes from the local amber craftsmen, both living and long dead, from whom I have been collecting information and notes for 40 years,” wrote Chętnik in the year of the exhibition's opening. Two years later, he wrote “Housed in two rooms of the North Masovian Museum, the exhibition of the amber department has drawn greater attention to the institution. Huge crowds would come to see the exhibits of the local ‘Gold of the North,' about which very few people knew, the beautiful Kurpian artefacts made of the ‘local' amber caused a sensation, as did the original processing tools made by local craftsmen according to the old models they managed to preserve.... The exhibition, therefore, has fulfilled its role here.”

A permanent amber exhibition was opened in 1958 in the Museum's building in Sadowa Street. In May 1978, the exhibition practically ceased to exist, because almost all of the exhibits were stolen and the exhibiting equipment destroyed. When the exhibits were recovered, in spite of their partial destruction the Amber from the Middle Narew River Basin exhibition was reopened in 1980 in an almost unchanged arrangement, but in the Museum's new home in Krzywe Koło Street. According to the material catalogue, the collection consisted of raw amber, samples of amber-bearing earth, amber varieties, amber artefacts from the Narew River Basin, workshops, tools, semi-finished products, raw material and artefacts from outside the Narew region.
The collection of the Amber Department, despite being comparatively small (with 1,200 items) compared to the number of exhibits in the Museum's other Departments, is a unique (as well as the largest) regional amber collection in Poland, which documents extensively a small fragment of amber's age-old history. In 2005, the Museum moved to the building at 22 Dworna Street, which is currently undergoing refurbishment. Due to the works under way, the permanent exhibition on Amber from the Narew River Basin is closed.

* Dr Jerzy Jastrzębski is the Director of the North Masovian Museum in Łomża