History Museum

The Historical Museum in Białystok presents mostly exhibitions on the history of the city and the region. As the only facility in Poland, it has exhibits related to the Tatar settlement on the Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian border.

The museum holds over 35,000 exhibits. In the realities department you can admire everyday objects, such as furniture, vessels, jewelry, cigarette cases, and also works of art. In the archive department are located over 7,000 objects. These are extremely valuable and rare documents about education, industry, culture, as well as family archives, collections of maps and plans of the town from the 19th and 20th centuries, and old publications of Bialystok newspapers too. Moreover, exhibits related to the Białystok industry of the 19th and 20th centuries are presented. A worthwhile attraction is a collection of exhibits showing the history of the Tartar population professing Islam.

Another collections housed in the museum, present iconography. There are thousands of photographs, negatives, postcards and albums. The Numismatic Cabinet includes old Polish and foreign coins, banknotes, securities and tokens. The oldest specimens come from Greece and are around 2,300 years old. One of the most valuable exhibits are the rare Lithuanian half-grosz coins of Sigismund II Augustus minted in the Tykocin mint.