Wawel Underground: The Lapidarium

The Lapidarium exhibition showcases early modern architectural details and stone sculptures discovered during archaeological excavations in Wawel Castle’s cellars, offering insights into Renaissance construction and restoration history.

Planning your visit

Wawel is the hill where Polish kings were crowned and buried, and beneath the castle courtyards lie the foundations of everything that stood there before the Renaissance palace — Romanesque churches, medieval fortifications and earlier royal residences.

The Lapidarium occupies those cellars and displays the stonework recovered from them: carved capitals, portals, window frames, tomb fragments and sculpture, much of it from the sixteenth-century rebuilding under the Italian architects the Jagiellonians employed.

The value is architectural rather than decorative. These fragments show how the Gothic castle was converted into a Renaissance one, and how the twentieth-century restorers pieced the evidence together.

The rotunda of Saints Felix and Adauctus, one of the oldest surviving buildings in Poland, is part of the underground route.

Wawel's separate attractions each need their own timed ticket and they sell out.

Allow an hour. Current availability is shown below.