The 30th Mushroom Exhibition of the Białowieża Forest, 3–4 October 2026

A weekend fixed, a programme still to come

Białowieża National Park put up its notice on 11 August 2026, and it runs to four sentences. One urges the reader to plan an autumn weekend in the Białowieża Forest; one states that the jubilee thirtieth Mushroom Exhibition of the Białowieża Forest will be held on 3 and 4 October 2026 in Białowieża National Park; one promises that a detailed programme will be released shortly; the last is an invitation. That is the whole of the announcement. When the page was read again on 17 September 2026, five weeks on, no programme had appeared.

What is established, then, is a Saturday, a Sunday and the park itself. There are no opening hours, no ticket price and no statement that admission is free; no lecture, walk or workshop; and no building. The 7:30 to 15:30 times visible on the same page belong to the park office and sit in the site footer, not in the notice. The Polish Mycological Society passed the invitation on on 9 September 2026, in two lines and a link straight back to the park — a relay rather than a second, independent confirmation.

A thirtieth edition, and a series dated to 1994

The park calls this year’s exhibition the thirtieth and a jubilee. The series itself is described in only one place, the park’s own archived website, which says the autumn mushroom exhibition has been organised since 1994, that mycologists prepare it with help from pupils of the Zespół Szkół Leśnych, the forestry school in Białowieża, and that specimens of about 200 fungal species from the Białowieża Forest are shown each year. That page carries a 2007 copyright line and describes the series in general rather than the 2026 edition.

The two facts invite an arithmetic that does not work. The same archived page links a photo report from the twentieth exhibition, and an unbroken annual run from 1994 would make this year’s the thirty-third rather than the thirtieth. The recent years do line up — the park announced the twenty-ninth exhibition for 4 and 5 October 2025 — so either the series has had gaps or one of the two numbers means something other than it appears to, and the park does not say which. The edition number comes from the park and the starting year from the archive; the honest course is to report each against its own source rather than fold them into a tidy count of years.

A display, not a collecting trip

What such an exhibition consists of is set out only in that archived description of the series: fresh fruit bodies gathered in the Białowieża Forest and laid out side by side, whether the species is reckoned edible or poisonous. Exactly what will be on the tables in October 2026 has not been announced. It is, however, neither a foraging outing nor a market. A national park is not a place where mushrooms are collected, and attending the exhibition gives no entry to the strict protection area, which is visited separately and with a guide.

The archived page also gives the scale such a display draws on. It puts the Białowieża Forest at probably around 3,000 to 4,000 fungal species, of which about 1,800 are macrofungi, and then states 3,500 macrofungi for the whole of Poland — that last figure with no hedge at all, and for macrofungi only. These are the numbers of a website nearly two decades old rather than a current inventory, and are worth reading as an order of magnitude.

Before travelling

The venue has not been announced, and past editions suggest it moves. The park’s notice for the 29th exhibition, published on 10 September 2025, explained that because the Governor’s Manor was being renovated the display would be staged in the directorate building, in its former restaurant room. In 2026 the work has moved to the part of that directorate building occupied by the Nature and Forest Museum: since 8 June the roof covering and the observation tower have been under repair, so the tower, the museum car park and the lift are out of use, with completion expected by the end of October. Guessing a building is therefore pointless. Check the park’s news page for the programme shortly before setting out, and arrive expecting to look at fruit bodies rather than to gather them.