Brno: the Moravian Museum’s mushroom advice room at Biskupský dvůr

Five crowns, two days a week

Biskupský dvůr is a courtyard complex below Petrov cathedral in Brno and one of the buildings of the Moravian Museum. Inside it sit a mycological workplace and, attached to it, a mushroom advice room. Read on 17 September 2026, the museum’s advice room page gives the hours without embellishment: Monday 09:00–12:00 and 13:00–18:00, Tuesday 09:00–12:00 and 13:00–16:00, Wednesday to Sunday closed. Lower down sits a single line about money — “Určování hub pro veřejnost: základní poplatek 5 Kč”, identification of fungi for the public, basic fee five crowns. That is not a free service, even though five crowns is barely a price. The Czech word základní means basic in the sense of a starting rate, and the page does not say what might cost more.

The address the museum prints is Biskupský dvůr, Muzejní 2, 695 37 Brno, with the entrance from Zelný trh and Kapucínské náměstí. Two telephone numbers are given, +420 515 910 446 and +420 777 482 093, together with the e-mail addresses of two mycologists. The page carries no publication date and no revision date. The date attached to this entry is therefore the day we read it rather than the day the museum issued it, which is a distinction worth holding on to for any practical detail that comes from an undated page.

Two timetables that never overlap

The museum’s page for the building itself lists the exhibition hours, and they run in precise opposition: closed to the public on Monday and Tuesday, with school groups admitted on Tuesdays by prior arrangement, then Wednesday to Friday 09:00–17:00 and Saturday and Sunday 10:00–17:00. Tickets are bought at the box office of the Dietrichstein Palace and sales stop thirty minutes before closing; a full-price ticket to the permanent exhibition costs 90 crowns and one for the whole building 150, with concession and family rates listed alongside. The two calendars miss each other day for day. The advice room works while the galleries stand empty, and five crowns buys an identification, not admission to anything.

That same page prints a different address for the same complex: Muzejní 1, 659 37 Brno. The advice room page prints Muzejní 2, 695 37 Brno. The OpenStreetMap node for the building agrees with the first version, number 1 and postcode 659 37, rather than the second. We are not going to declare either wrong or quietly correct a postcode, so both are quoted as the museum publishes them. There is one building, and only the advice room page tells a visitor which side to walk in from.

Three mycologists, and a herbarium that is elsewhere

The botany department page places the mycological workplace and the advice room together at Muzejní 2 and names three people there: RNDr. Vladimír Antonín, CSc., Mgr. Hana Ševčíková, Ph.D., and Mgr. Jan Běťák. The first two appear as research and development staff in mycology, the third as curator; in the department’s full staff list Ševčíková is also deputy head. The page gives job titles, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, and nothing more. It does not establish how many hours anyone works, so neither do we.

The department describes its remit as the systematics and phytogeography of higher plants, mosses and fungi, together with the databasing of the BRNM herbarium collections, and it lists the advice room among its permanent activities. The Index Herbariorum record for BRNM, listed in our sources, gives a founding year of 1818, 1,043,996 specimens in total and 68,000 fungal specimens databased. The year is not a coincidence: the building page records that in 1818, a year after the museum was founded, it took its first premises in this very complex. The 68,000 has to be read literally, though. It sits in the field numFungiDatabased, which counts database records, while numFungi, the size of the fungal collection itself, reads zero in the same record. The collection has simply not been reported. The record was last modified on 13 May 2024.

One thing here is easy to miss: the herbarium is not behind the advice counter. The postal address Index Herbariorum holds for BRNM is Hviezdoslavova 29a, CZ-627 00 Brno, across town, and it is the same address at which the botany department is based; the coordinates in that same record point there too, not at the courtyard below Petrov. The museum keeps the herbarium as an institution, but a visitor to the advice room sees a table, a mycologist and their own basket, not a million sheets.

What an identification does not settle

The museum calls the service určování hub pro veřejnost, identification of fungi for the public. It is not official permission to eat anything, and it does not move responsibility onto the person who names the specimen. An archived version of the department page, the one that redirects readers to mzm.cz for current information “from 2011”, described the workplace more broadly: it listed cooperation with hospitals on expert assessments in mushroom poisonings, and quoted the same basic fee of five crowns. That is a different route from the queue at the table, and the museum’s present pages do not repeat it.

Two things are worth checking before a journey. The first is the timetable. From 1 November 2025 to 30 April 2026 the museum cut the advice room back to Tuesdays only, for energy savings. That notice has gone: its address now redirects to the current page, which shows Monday and Tuesday, and the Tuesday-only wording survives mainly in search engine previews. The same restriction could return from 1 November 2026, a few weeks after this entry appears. The second is language. The advice room page names no language of service other than Czech, and none of the museum pages we read states the year the room began, so we give it no anniversary either.

What to bring, then: whole fruit bodies including the base of the stem, a note of habitat and substrate, the date, and a photograph taken where the fungus was growing. Write the scientific name down exactly, and where an identification stayed provisional, keep that qualification in the notebook. The qualification is part of the answer rather than a gap in it, and it is what separates a visit to a mycologist from a question that is only hunting for agreement.