Muzeum Samorządowe Ziemi Strzyżowskiej im. Zygmunta Leśniaka

The Local Government Museum of the Strzyżów Region occupies a historic bourgeois townhouse dating from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries on Łukasiewicza Street. Until the Second World War, the building was inhabited by Jewish residents of Strzyżów. The museum’s main building contains eight exhibition rooms, while its collections comprise several thousand objects relating to history, archaeology, palaeontology, art, military history and ethnography.

Among the figures featured in the exhibitions are the Young Poland painter Wojciech Weiss, whose works created in Strzyżów are held in the museum’s collection, and the biochemist Franciszek Chrapkiewicz-Chapeville. While working at Rockefeller University in New York, Chrapkiewicz took part in research that demonstrated the key role of tRNA in decoding genetic information during protein synthesis. A separate exhibition is also devoted to Ryszard Szaro, an athlete from Strzyżów who played in the American NFL during the 1970s.

In addition to its main building, the museum operates three branches. In the town centre are the Municipal Gallery on Strzyżów’s market square and an exhibition devoted to the town’s Jewish residents, arranged in the building of the former synagogue. In the eastern part of the town is the third branch - an underground railway shelter tunnel from the Second World War, where Adolf Hitler’s staff train “Amerika” was stationed on 27-28 August 1941.