Museum of Gdańsk (Main Town Hall)

The Museum of Gdańsk is the city's history museum, and its principal branch occupies the Main Town Hall at ul. Długa 46/47 in Gdańsk, in the Pomeranian region of Poland. The Gothic-Renaissance building dates from the 14th to 16th centuries, with its tower completed in the 1480s and crowned by Anthonis van Obbergen in 1561. The museum, established in 1970 as the Historical Museum of Gdańsk, uses the historic rooms as the core of its display. The Red Room, the former council chamber, is the highlight, with a carved and painted ceiling and Isaac van den Blocke's The Apotheosis of Gdańsk, a vision of the city's civic and commercial prosperity. The Great Hall, the Winter Hall and the Small Council Room show Renaissance and Baroque furniture, tapestries, portraits of burghers and kings, and civic silver. The museum presents the history of the city from its medieval foundation through the Hanseatic age and the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries to the destruction of 1945, in a thematic arrangement rather than a strict chronology. The building was burned in March 1945 and rebuilt over the following decades, with many fittings returned from wartime storage or recreated from photographs. Its interiors are therefore both an exhibit and a record of postwar reconstruction. Exhibitions also feature the history of Gdańsk's guilds and port trade, as well as changing displays on daily life, art and the civic government. The museum has other branches across the city, including the Artus Court, the Uphagen House and the Amber Museum, and it manages the tower view. Visitors typically spend 60 to 90 minutes in the museum.