Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre
Theatre and memory centre in Lublin's old city gate, recording the vanished Jewish quarter.
The Grodzka Gate was built into Lublin's medieval walls in the fourteenth century and given its present classical form in 1785 by Dominik Merlini. It stood between the Christian town and the Jewish quarter, and came to be known as the Jewish Gate. The quarter beyond it was destroyed by the Germans during the occupation, and much of the ground was later covered with roads and concrete, leaving an emptiness that the centre now takes as the starting point of its work.
The NN Theatre began here in 1990, when a group of artists opened the derelict gate and staged their first production. Since 1998 it has been a municipal cultural institution combining theatre, oral history, archives and education. Its permanent exhibition, Lublin. Memory of Place, fills the gate with photographs, documents and recorded testimony, and the centre also runs the Underground Route, the Cellar under Fortune, the Imaginarium Theatre and the House of Words.
Highlights
- Permanent exhibition Lublin. Memory of Place inside the gate
- Oral history archive of recorded testimonies from the city
- Annual commemorations such as the Day of Remembrance for Henio Żytomirski
- Other sites run by the centre, including the House of Words
