The Museum of Toruń Gingerbread - The District Museum in Toruń

Located in the building of the oldest European gingerbread factory, which used to belong to the famous Weese family, the Museum of Toruń Gingerbread is the largest gingerbread museum in Europe. It has the largest collection of wooden gingerbread moulds and is responsible for the most extensive research into the history of Toruń’s gingerbread. Opened in 2015, it is a result of many years of work conducted by the nearly-160-years-old District Museum in Toruń and the oldest Polish Confectionery Factory –Kopernik S.A – which combined forces to create an entity which would be responsible for cultivating the traditions of Toruń gingerbread.

Those who visit the Museum of Toruń Gingerbread can explore its impressive permanent exhibition which is both interactive and full of specialist knowledge, make a real gingerbread cake themselves, make use of a children’s play area, admire a visual display on the outer façade of the building (mapping), spend time at a colourful playground located in the inner courtyard, or discover unique, historical exhibits which have been collected for over 100 years.
A virtual shopkeeper installed in the basement of the museum informs visitors about the realities of running a medieval market stall. The same floor houses also a unique collection of gingerbread moulds – the largest one in the Central Europe, representing the period from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. This section of the exhibit includes also an oven for baking gingerbread from the 1960s.

The first floor of the factory focuses on places where gingerbread was typically encountered in the everyday life of Toruń in modern times and during the People’s Republic of Poland era. Visitors can explore a traditional kitchen, looking into a virtual cookbook containing old recipes for gingerbread cakes, get into a Żuk car which was typically used to deliver Toruń gingerbread to shops, and finally visit the factory director’s office and look into a shop filled with packaging of old Toruń sweets.

In 2018, the museum was enlarged by adding new areas, including a room dedicated to gingerbread-themed fairy tales and legends, as well as a so-called gingerbread laboratory, a site of various culinary workshops.

The Museum of Toruń Gingerbread is a delightful, professional project whose advantages were recognised in 2016 when the museum was awarded the most important Polish museum award – the Sybil statuette, and found itself among the 40 best museums in Europe, receiving a prestigious recognition in the competition for the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) organised by the European Forum of Museums in 2017.

muzeum.torun.pl