Musealization of Wawel Castle 1945-61 - royal heritage and political legitimacy in early socialist Poland - an expanded bibliography

This is an expanded bibliography for the article devoted to the musealisation of Wawel Royal Castle in Cracow in the years 1945-1961. The article, published in Museum History Journal, contains only footnotes without a separate bibliography (a list of all writings used in preparing the text). The expanded bibliography includes archival and published sources, books and articles with hyperlinks. The article’s aim is to analyze why Poland’s socialist authorities decided to transform Wawel Castle into a historic house museum and how they took advantage of its new role in order to bolster their political legitimacy during their rule’s initial period. My argument is that Wawel Castle’s transformation into a historic house museum was motivated by the building’s status as the ultimate national symbol and its specific geopolitical situation. The establishment of the historic castle museum demonstrated the regime’s attachment to national heritage, serving also to adapt the castle to its socialist vision. My discussion of this problem is based mainly on archival sources from the collections of the Wawel Royal Castle and the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw. Moreover, I have studied contemporary newspaper reports as well as the Wawel Museum's publications from that period.