Natural History Museum ‘Dr Curt Heinke’

The Museum für Naturkunde ‘Dr. Curt Heinke’ sits in the Exnersches Haus, a plain classical building with a slate roof and two dormers in the old town of Zittau. The house was built around 1800 as a concert hall and later became a private home before the city bought it in 1975 for its museum. It stands on the north side of Klosterstraße, close to the junction with Pfarrstraße, surrounded by the parish office, the Heffterbau and the mainsche Haus. The building is protected as a cultural monument for its architectural and local history. The museum began in 1922 when Curt Heinke organised a geology exhibition that drew 4,500 visitors. After temporary homes in the Realgymnasium and later the Johanneum, it moved in 1976 to the Exnersches Haus as the Museum für Geologie. In 1999 it was renamed in honour of Heinke, the founder and first director. Oskar Mießler, a local locksmith, helped assemble the early collections of regional rocks, fossils and prehistoric finds. Inside, visitors once saw mineral cabinets, fossil slabs and a six-metre tree stump from the Hartau clay pit. A landscape model of the former Olbersdorf open-cast mine was added for the 1999 garden show. The displays were arranged in corridors and two halls, with later additions such as African minerals brought back by Heinke. The exhibits now await reopening after recent closure for technical reasons.