The article informing about a new exhibition in the Archeological Mueum in Poznan sounded so promising that I’ve been waiting impatiently for some time off to go and visit it. The time off finally arrived and I still wanted to see the exhibit, so – of course – I did go and check it out.

The museum is located next to the Old Market in the old part of the city – cobblestone streets, old houses and a few pretty god bookshops in the area make it my favorite part of Poznan(not to mention that my regular tattoo shop is right around the corner!).

The entrance to the exhibit space is well-marked. The first thing the visitor can see after entering it is two clay Mayan statues – male and female – dressed in the traditional, Mayan way and wearing traditional jewelry and body art. Both statues are pretty nicely described and the description includes such interesting details as ‘facial scarification,’ ‘filed teeth’ and ‘squint’ (which allegedly was a sign of beauty for the Maya).

The whole exhibit is rather small which was an unpleasant surprise for me. Displayed clay statues, jewelry and clothing occupy only three tiny rooms and they definitely don’t say enough about the Maya civilization.

Since I like to focus on the upsides more than on the downsides, here I definitely liked big pictures portraying the Maya people which showed very nicely beautiful facial scarifications, stretched lobe piercings and big labret piercings both on men and women.

One of the much advertised attractions of the exhibit was a ‘Dress the Maya’ computer ‘game.’ Due to either my own bad luck with machines or – maybe – some dysfunction of the computer, I wasn’t able to dress anyone, though.

The information on the objects displayed and some general information on the Maya culture itself are both in Polish and English which is a nice (and not that obvious) touch although it isn’t better than stuff you can find online. The biggest upside of this exhibit for me are a few beautiful pictures of the Maya people bringing them to life in a way and showing us what they looked like. Everything else is just too small, too superficial, not really satisfying.

I did, however, find a note about the Maya calendar quite reassuring.