This is an all-time record, museum director Andrzej Betlej told a news conference, adding that the 2 millionth mark is likely to be exceeded this weekend.
Last year, the Wawel Castle museum attracted 1.78 million visitors.
Betlej attributed the museum’s growing popularity to the success of several temporary exhibitions, including those of works by Kraków painters of the Baroque period, which had an audience of about 100,000, and of Rococo sculpture by artists from the Lviv circle, which drew over 120,000 visitors.
Betlej told the media that a new exhibition opening on Friday would be one of the largest undertakings in the history of the museum.
Entitled The Image of the Golden Age, the exhibition focuses on the flowering of the arts and culture in Poland and Lithuania under the last kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty in the 16th century.
On display are some 450 works of art, 400 of which come from some of the world’s most prestigious collections in 13 countries, including the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the British Library in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the National Museum in Prague, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.
The exhibition runs until mid-December.
(mk/gs)