Museum of the Greater Poland Uprising, Poznań

The project to create a new Museum of the Greater Poland Uprising in Poznań, Poland, is progressing. The museum will be document and memorialise the Wielkopolska Uprising which took place from 1918-1919. The uprising was a military insurrection of Poles living in the region of what is now Poland against German rule. The uprising played a major role in the area’s incorporation into the Second Polish Republic after the First World War. Currently, a small exhibition on the Uprising is housed in a building in the city’s Market Square. The winners of the architectural competition, organised by the Wielkopolska Museum of Independence were the Warsaw-based firm, WXCA. The PLN 370 million (£72 million) project will be located at the hill of Saint Wojciech in the vicinity of the Poznań Army Monument. In June 2020, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage awarded further funding to construct the new museum, which was initially estimated to cost PLN 150 million. The building will be 10,000 square meters, 30% percent of which is estimated to be filled by permanent exhibitions. It is hoped that the museum will welcome 100,000 visitors per year. The project began tendering for construction services in the spring of 2023, and launched a permanent exhibition design competition in March 2023. In September 2023, it was announced that a team comprising Warsaw-based design firm TRIAS AVI and international firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates had been appointed to design the permanent exhibition for the new museum. The permanent exhibition’s narrative, supported by the museum collections, will guide visitors through over two centuries of regional history and trace the impact of the uprising. A key feature of the permanent exhibition will be the Central Rotunda, displaying the names of participants of the uprising and a map of Greater Poland to serve as a place of memory. The estimated PLN 65 million (£12.6 million) exhibition will be based around several participatory ‘multi-module spectacles’, with elements of the exhibition serving as ‘scenes full of interesting and sometimes spectacular events’. The Museum of the Greater Poland Uprising is expected to be open in 2026. (Updated 25 October 2023)