Official website of the museum (www.vcm.cz)

One of the Czech museums, which aims systematically its interest in history of arms, is East Bohemian museum in town Pardubice.

The museum is located in Pardubice castle that is one of the most interesting renaissance buildings in Bohemia and Moravia. The building itself is surrounded by unique moat, stony wall and when there might be a danger, the nearby area could be all flooded by water from local rivers the Labe and the Chrudimka. Inside the castle there have been preserved the original early renaissance decorations and the whole building has been reconstructed recently.

There is more then a hundred – year tradition in displaying arms. The museum has been devoted to this tradition systematically in the last couple of years

A visitor can see a permanent arms exhibition, which is just a tiny piece of a vast collection. The aim of the collection is to give the knowledge of the basic categories of arms to the non-professionals, and at the same time to be interesting for the professionals who might find the arms attractive because of their technical and artistic look.

At the beginning of the exhibition there are metal works on display, a complete armor in Maximillian style made in 19th century and semi-long cuirassier armor from the 30-year-war.

The first part of the exhibition contains cold arms. There are presented basic categories of these arms – unique medieval swords, which were found in East Bohemia, a group of middle European cutlasses, fencing swords from the 18th and 19th century and a great number of swords from all over Europe including several very interesting samples of middle European cavalry swords from the end of the 16th and the beginning of 17th century. The exposition, which is devoted to the hangers displays, apart from some business and hunting hangers from the 18th and 19th centuries, also two unique medieval hangers. Wooden arms are placed mainly along the outside walls.

The main part of the exhibition consists of shooting guns, which are divided into muzzle-loaders, breech-loaders, repeating rifles and automatic guns.

Among muzzle - loaders there are civilian and military arms from all Europe. Their origin is mainly related to the central Europe. As an example we can use Austrian rifle Augustin or a luxurious double-barrelled rifle made by gun maker Schiling from Suhl.

Western Europe and America are generously presented by one- shot firelocks. Of course some needle-guns by Dreys and Chassepot cannot be missed in the collection. A single part of the collection contains repeating rifles - in Europe made Mauser, Mosin systems or Lee Enfield and American repeating rifles Spencer, Winchester or Colt.

The admirers of automatic guns could be enchanted by a rare Czechoslovak machine rifle ZB 47, made just in limited number of some tens pieces, that is placed together with other European makes of self-loading guns and machine guns from about the mid of the 20th century.

Single vitrines show-up pistols and revolvers. A specialist will see here both European and American makes including a series of Czech makes.

Apart from the arms the castle offers a glass exhibition, a rare collection of postcards, show-round of the knights premises with paintings on walls, and time to time there are other short-time exhibitions.