Museum of East Bohemia in Pardubice

One of the largest museum collections of natural history in East Bohemia is located in the Museum of East Bohemia in Pardubice, which was founded in the 19th century. In the depositories of the Pardubice chateau and in exhibitions open to the public, there are exhibits mainly from the Pardubice region mapping the local flora and fauna and geological development.

The Pardubice Museum is exceptional among other museum institutions in the whole region for its natural history collections. Although not all the objects from the extensive depositories are on display for the public, the museum manages a large number of important objects from various fields of natural sciences. Today`s museum is the successor of the first mainly amateur collectors of natural history and professional naturalists. A large part of the collections comes from the time of the museum`s foundation, i.e. from the end of the 19th century and later from the First Czechoslovak Republic period, when the museum acquired the premises of Pardubice Castle, where it is still housed today. The zoological exhibits are the oldest collections of the museum. The most ancient ones date back to the 1880s and came to the museum thanks to Doctor František Hromádka, a Pardubice physician and naturalist. These objects were then added to by the efforts of museum staff and local natural scientists, and even very valuable exhibits were acquired, such as a pair of now extinct Passenger pigeons. The museum also boasts the third largest collection of birds of prey in the country. Another very extensive and old collection is the botanical collection. It dates back to the 1920s and is based on the herbaria of the local teacher Emanuel Kalensky, which also contains some very old collections from the first half of the 19th century. The collections contain mainly flora of eastern Bohemia, of other regions of the Czech Republic and occasionally also non-European plants. Among the collectors from whom the museum has its exhibits, there are also important botanists who have become world famous, such as Emil Hadač or Franz Maximilian Opiz. The geological collection contains mainly rocks and minerals from the Pardubice region and its surroundings and demonstrates the diversity and transformation of the north-eastern part of the Czech massif. A separate collection of minerals from the Křižanovice deposit in the Železné Hory Mountains is unique. The smallest collection in terms of the number of specimens is the paleontological collection dating from the younger and older Quaternary and among the rarest exhibits are mammoth tusks and molars.

(Author: Archives of Pardubice museum)

Pardubice museum (Author: Archives of Pardubice museum)