Lviv Historical Museum, Lviv

Lviv Historical Museum

The Lviv Historical Museum was founded in 1893. In 1908 the city bought the house at 6 Rynok Square, the Kornyakt palazzo, for museum purposes, for the National Museum named after King Jan III Sobieski. In 1918 the collection of 5 thousand items of the Historical Museum was moved here from the town hall.

The museum building on Rynok Square, 6, a pearl of Renaissance architecture, was built in 1580 to a design by the Italian Petro Barbona for the wealthy Lviv merchant Konstantyn Kornyakt, a Greek by origin. The Kornyakt house has a splendid inner courtyard (16th century) with open galleries under arcades. Since 1993 the Royal Halls have housed the exposition of the «Historical Valuables» department, which presents the most valuable artistic monuments of the 17th–19th centuries: furniture, painting, antique clocks, porcelain, art glass and old orders.

The Lviv Historical Museum is one of the oldest and richest museums of Ukraine and holds more than 300 thousand exhibits. All the notable monuments and exhibits of the museum are placed in several buildings. Its exposition introduces the history of the city of Lviv and the Galician lands from the earliest times to the present day. The museum expositions are located in architectural monuments of the 16th–18th centuries: buildings No. 4, 6 and 24 on Rynok Square and the former City Arsenal at 5 Pidvalna Street. Today more than 330 thousand museum items are kept here.

The museum’s most significant collections are materials of archaeological excavations, tools, products of Lviv guild masters, works of art, old coins, orders and medals, and weapons. In 1991 the Department of the History of Ukraine’s Liberation Struggle was formed. {{TEL_1}}