Underground Tourist Route

Beneath the Market Square is a chain of medieval cellars carved into the bedrock — at its lowest point, 25 metres underground, the deepest cellar system open to visitors in Poland. The tour is guided (in Polish, with English audio guides) and takes about 45 minutes, threading through 34 chambers connected by stone-cut passages.

The exhibits along the route cover Rzeszów's history from its founding in 1354 — merchant trade, the Lubomirski family, the Jewish community, the Galician partition — using artefacts found during the excavations and reconstructions of period rooms. The cellars themselves are the real attraction: vaulted, candle-cool, and quietly atmospheric. Bring a jacket; it is ten degrees down there year-round.

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A story
The cellars were dug into the soft sandstone under the square between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, used by merchants to store wine, salt, and grain at a stable cool temperature. They were sealed and largely forgotten until the 1980s, when several houses on the market square began to subside — the cellars beneath them were collapsing. Excavation and stabilisation took twenty years; the route opened to visitors in 2007.