Antonina Lesnevskaya Pharmacy Museum

Brief Information

In this museum, Warsaw’s pharmacy history is assembled not as a row of display cases, but as several almost self-contained working spaces. The permanent exhibition occupies only three rooms, which makes it especially clear how much the furniture can tell: the pharmacy table, cash register, cabinets, counters, vessels, and packaging show not only medicines, but also the order of an old pharmacy.

Since 2006, the museum has been located on the ground floor of a historic house on Piwna Street. The strongest turn in its collection is connected with furniture created at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries: it belonged to a pharmacy in Ambroszkiewicz’s house, which survived the war but was demolished in the 1970s. After relocations and the closure of another pharmacy, these cabinets ended up here. Thus an ordinary pharmacy interior became a rare surviving fragment of the urban fabric.

What to Notice First

You can compare two types of objects: furniture that set the order of service, and small containers in which that order was transformed into medicine. The cabinets from the pharmacy in Wolomin are made of walnut and pear wood; they were designed by the pharmacist Marcin Olechowski himself and made by the local carpenter Ignatowicz. The four wall cabinets behind crystal glass and the counter-cabinets are important not as decoration, but as storage devices: they show how the pharmacy worked through the eyes of both the pharmacist and the customer.

Next to the porcelain, glass, and crystal vessels and cardboard packaging, it is worth noticing the laboratory items: a tablet press from 1903 and a mortar for crushing poisons. They remind us that the pharmacy was also a place where medicines were made. The deepest layer is provided by vessels from a pharmacy that operated from 1602 in the Royal Castle: this archaeological find changes the scale of the visit, because the small vessels connect the museum rooms with a much earlier pharmacy practice in Warsaw.