A 150-year-old time capsule has been opened for the first time in Poland.

In the mid-1990s, archaeologists were called to a street in Wroclaw and discovered a small metal cylinder.

According to a press release from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education on July 2, the metal shape was clearly old, but archaeologists, without thinking much about it, placed the pipe in the city museum.

The cylinder sat untouched for years, officials said. That’s when experts realized there was something inside.

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As reported in the release, Katarzyna Kroczak, chief conservator of collections at the Ossoliński National Institute, said the first step will be to disinfect what is currently called the capsule.

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The research teams then had to develop a strategy to safely open the capsule without damaging anything that might be inside, Kroczak said.

The tube was carefully cut open and its contents—a letter and a newspaper—were revealed.

The strange cylinder was a time capsule from 1865, officials said.

According to the release, it was found in a rolled-up letter 150 years ago by three neighbors living on the street where the pipe was later found.

Neighbors wrote about a project to renovate an old water supply system on their street and said they wanted to commemorate the occasion with a time capsule, officials said.

According to the communique, each neighbor signed the letter and wrapped it in the Breslauer Zeitung newspaper from the day the capsule was hidden.

Archaeologists say it is rare to determine who owned an artifact, but in this case they were able to identify the neighbors and find other documents about them, allowing them to reconstruct their lives more than a century and a half later.

The reconstruction described in the letter was part of the latest renovations to the medieval water supply system, officials said. Construction of the modern system began in Wrocław shortly after the capsule was assembled.

The capsule, letter and newspaper were displayed in the museum as a preserved moment in time.

Wroclaw is located approximately 215 miles southwest of Warsaw.

Google Translate was used to translate the press release of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.