About the project
In the 1950s, the first private museum on the Gdańsk Coast was established in Puck, founded by Józef Budzisz. This place, called the Small Fisheries Museum in Puck became one of the most frequently visited tourist attractions in the city. It attracted tourists interested in the old fishing craft to Puck. Budzisz's fishing collections promoted the culture and tradition of Kashubian fishing. In the 1990s, after the founder's death, the museum ceased to exist. In 2019, some of the exhibits, thanks to the family's kindness, became a part of the collection of the Puck Region Museum.
The Józef Budzisz Virtual Fisheries Museum aimed at presenting his figure and saving his work from oblivion. Let virtual space become a place where you can see, get to know and appreciate the passion of the Puck fisherman.
The organizer of the virtual exhibition is the Museum of the Puck Region. The museum does not have a place where it could permanently display Budzisz's collection. Virtual space gives an opportunity for its wider popularization. For the realisation of this project, the Museum of the Puck Region obtained a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in 2024. The project partners were: Puck County, the Association of Friends of the Museum of the Puck Region and the Local Tourist Organization of Northern Kaszuby.
Here we would like to thank the family of Józef Budzisz for lending iconographic materials and the National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk for sharing a recording of an interview with Józef Budzisz conducted in 1974 by Roman Klim.
The director of the Museum of the Puck Region, Barbara Kos-Dąbrowska and the creators of the exhibition: Kamila Tucholska, Joanna Grochowska, Roman Drzeżdżon wish you a pleasant visit to the virtual exhibition.
The look of the Small Fishery Museum of Józef Budzisz
What had tourists seen who, in the years 1954–1992, wandered the streets of Puck and came to the hospitable of Józef Budzisz's house?
Today we can see the look of these small interiors thanks to the preserved press, which described this museum. Preserved archival photographs also provide some insight.
Let's move inside the tenement house at 7 Morska Street to feel its unique atmosphere. Standing in the doorway of the room, we will see display cases and probably self-made shelves on which models of boats were placed. On the lowest one, there are a sailing boat, a rowing boat and cutters.
We will sit on a couch imitating the shape of a boat to look at starfish, crayfish, crabs and cod, one of which weighed 7 kg. Further: Budzisz turns on a lamp in the form of an anchor, and the light brings out old-type nets from the shadows - cotton nets, no longer produced today, marks, eel hooks and salmon hooks. In the corner stays a spinning wheel for spinning cotton (…). And when we go deeper: at some point, the pear-shaped glass ball lights up like magnesia, inside the ball is a miniature of the largest fishing cutter port on the Baltic Sea in Władysławowo.
In the space of this small museum, there were also various fishery tools, fishery needles (in Kashubian klészczczi ), fishgigs, and an axe. Skates and an equipment box from a boat of Józef's father, Antoni. Using their example, Józef told his guests about the fishing craft. All this was complemented by fishing nets suspended from the ceiling, in which dissected fish were entangled - cod, garfish, flounder. Baltic fish dried and stuffed with oakums, some lie in glass cases as if sleeping in the depths of water - others sway on lines as if they were blown by the sea breeze. Józef Budzisz even used tree boughs taken from the sea to arrange the interior. He supplemented his collection with ships in the bottles. Some of the collected objects, like a shark's tail, exotic fish fins, baleen, and even shells did not come from the Baltic Sea. These were gifts received from deep-sea fishermen friends, and Budzisz displayed them in his collection. It was said that the exhibition was ... a dream background for these sea stories, ... for some, the retrospective marine exhibition is interesting, for others the most valuable harvest of the Baltic Sea is fish. According to researchers, all these collections do not constitute a museum, although every historian would find something interesting in this mass of objects. These are living ethnographic chambers of memory, transmitting memories of people and facts.
The quoted fragments come from the articles:
Pestka S., Budziszowe rozgwiazdy i pomeranki, „Dziennik Bałtycki”, nr 148 (9306) z 23–24 VI 1974 r.
Listen to the conversation (in Polish) with Józef Budzisz, who talks about his museum
Author: Roman Klim, 1974, National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk
