Muzeum Historii Spółdzielczości

The initiative to establish a museum that would document the history of Polish cooperativism was put forward by Franciszek Stefczyk in February 1918, during the First Conference of Polish Cooperative Guides. It was then that the collection began to be assembled, initially in Kraków and later in Warsaw. The museum was due to open its doors on 1 September 1939; for obvious reasons, this never happened. The first home of the Museum was the former State School of Agricultural Cooperatives in Nałęczów, from where it was moved to the headquarters of the National Cooperative Council in 2001. Its holdings comprise over 24,000 exhibits: documents and photographs, often of unique value, banners, numismatics, medals and artistic exhibits: paintings and sculpture. The Museum's specialised library comprises nearly 10,000 books and more than 250 titles of cooperative periodicals from various historical periods.