Collegium Novum

The building contains lecture rooms including an impressive assembly hall (called Aula), Rector's, Deans', and other university authorities' offices as well as those of a number of prominent professors.

Already at the time of its grand opening, the assembly hall (Aula) of the new building was too small to accommodate all guests on all occasions, even though the number of students did not exceed 1200 with approximately one hundred professors.

In the University's archives there is a formal invitation reading: “Zoll requires no ticket and wishes the ceremony to be exclusively male.” In another statement, Edward Janczewski “expresses his opposition to the idea of admitting ladies to the ceremonies.” [1] Until the end of First World War, a portrait of emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, painted by Kazimierz Pochwalski, hung in the Aula of the Collegium.

On the upper floor of the College there is a lecture hall named after Józef Szujski – now used by historians – with the commemorative plaque in remembrance of the events surrounding Nazi German action called Sonderaktion Krakau where 183 professors were arrested and later sent to camps in Sachsenhausen and Dachau.

The plaque reads: "For the freedom of spirit and service to science and nation of Jagiellonian University professors deceitfully and forcefully taken away from this hall and imprisoned by the Nazi occupant on November 6, 1939."