Kraków: Royal Route & Kazimierz

This Barbican was built around fourteen ninety-eight. Poland was genuinely frightened at the time. The Ottoman Empire had been pushing through the Balkans for decades, and the Polish king Jan Olbracht had just returned from a failed campaign against them in the eastern borderlands. He wanted his capital's northern gate to hold against anything. He was right to be cautious. The Ottomans reached the gates of Vienna in sixteen eighty-three. They never reached Kraków.

The fortress has four levels: a ground-floor dungeon, a gatehouse storey, a wooden archer's gallery, and a crenellated rampart at the top. In good weather, from April to October, you can walk through the interior and climb to the rampart for a few zloty. It is worth doing.

Here is the strangest thing about this place. In the early nineteenth century, after the failed Kosciuszko Uprising of seventeen ninety-four and the subsequent Russian and Austrian occupation, the Austrian authorities decided to demolish Kraków's medieval walls — and this Barbican along with them. Demolition began. Most of the walls came down between eighteen hundred and eighteen seventeen. The Barbican was saved by a single professor at the Jagiellonian University, Feliks Radwanski, who convinced the Austrian administration that the structure was a vital windbreak protecting citizens from respiratory illness. They believed him. The Barbican stayed. The walls were gone. In their place, the city planted a long green ring-park called the Planty, which traces the exact line of the vanished fortifications all the way around the Old Town. You can see the edge of it on both sides of you right now.

When you are ready, walk south through the Barbican and through the narrow walled passage beyond it. You will emerge through a second gate into the Old Town. That gate is Saint Florian's Gate, and it is the last of the eight original medieval city gates of Kraków still standing. Walk through it and meet us on the street on the other side.

Now look south down the street ahead of you. Florianska is about three hundred and fifty metres long and runs straight from this gate to the Main Market Square. It has been Kraków's most important street for seven hundred and fifty years. Merchants, kings, pilgrims, students, and today several million tourists a year have walked these cobblestones.

The facades along the street are a mixture of Gothic foundations and later Renaissance and Baroque face-lifts. Look up at number forty-five on the left — Hotel Pod Roza, the Hotel Under the Rose, which dates its roots to the sixteenth century. Tsar Alexander the First of Russia stayed here. Franz Liszt stayed here. Honoré de Balzac stayed here. It is still a hotel.

On the right, about halfway down the street, watch for number forty-five — no, forty-three. Jama Michalika. Step inside if you have five minutes. The interior is one of the finest Art Nouveau café spaces in Central Europe, decorated between nineteen oh five and nineteen twelve by artists associated with the Zielony Balonik, the Green Balloon cabaret, which was the Polish equivalent of the Chat Noir in Paris. Stained glass, marionette puppets, and walls covered in caricature drawings of the politicians and artists of Austrian-era Kraków. The coffee is fine. The atmosphere is something else entirely.

Two doors down is the Czartoryski Museum, which holds the single most valuable object in Poland: Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, painted around fourteen eighty-nine. It is one of only four surviving Leonardo paintings of women. If you have an hour to spare later in your visit, go and see it. It is two minutes from where you are standing.

Walk south toward the square. As you approach, the street opens into a vast, flat, almost unbelievable expanse of stone. That is the Rynek — the Main Market Square — and it is your next stop.

The square was laid out in twelve fifty-seven, after the Mongol invasion of twelve forty-one. The Mongol army under Batu Khan rode through the Carpathians, reached Kraków, and burned it to the ground. When the city was rebuilt sixteen years later under Duke Boleslaw the Chaste, the planners redesigned the entire town around this enormous central square on a perfect grid. That grid and that square have been here ever since.

Look at what surrounds you. The enormous red-brick basilica with two mismatched towers on the eastern edge is Saint Mary's — your next stop. The long yellow Renaissance building in the very centre of the square, with its arcaded ground floor, is the Sukiennice, the Cloth Hall, which we will visit after Saint Mary's. The tall slender tower on the southwestern edge of the square is the Town Hall Tower, the only piece remaining of the original Kraków town hall that was demolished in eighteen twenty. You can climb it for a view of the whole square.

Look at the pavement near the base of the Town Hall Tower. You will find a brass plaque set into the stones. On the twenty-fourth of March, seventeen ninety-four, the general Tadeusz Kosciuszko — who had fought alongside George Washington in the American Revolutionary War — stood on this exact spot and swore a public oath to lead an uprising against the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian powers that had been carving up Poland between them. The uprising failed. Poland was wiped from the map for a hundred and twenty-three years. But the oath happened here.

Also on the eastern side of the Cloth Hall, look for the bronze statue of a man standing on a tall plinth. That is Adam Mickiewicz, considered the greatest Polish Romantic poet, the country's equivalent of Byron and Whitman combined. The statue was unveiled in eighteen ninety-eight. The Nazis dynamited it in nineteen forty. It was rebuilt in nineteen fifty-five. If someone in Kraków says "I'll meet you under Adam," this is what they mean.

When you are ready, walk toward the great brick basilica on the eastern side of the square. The entrance is on the side facing you.

Walk through the ground-floor arcade. Inside, the long central passage is still lined with market stalls, exactly as it has been for centuries. Amber jewellery from the Baltic coast — genuine Baltic amber, yellow-orange and often containing trapped insects millions of years old — wooden boxes, carved chess sets, embroidered cloth, silver rings. The quality varies. The sellers are accustomed to hagglers but not aggressive about it.

Now take the stairs to the upper floor. Almost nobody does this, because almost nobody knows what is up there. The entire upper storey of the Sukiennice houses the National Museum's gallery of nineteenth-century Polish painting, and it is one of the great under-visited museum rooms in Central Europe. Jan Matejko's enormous canvas of "Prussian Homage" — depicting the Duke of Prussia kneeling in this very square before the Polish king in fifteen twenty-five — dominates one wall. Witold Pruszkowski's mythological scenes, Henryk Siemiradzki's classical allegories — the whole arc of Polish historical and Romantic painting is here. Entry is around fifteen zloty. Give it an hour if you can.

One last detail: at the eastern end of the Cloth Hall, mounted on the outer wall, you can find a display of the Zelazo Kupieckie — the Merchant's Iron, the medieval standard weight against which all Kraków merchants had to calibrate their scales. It has been fixed to this wall since around fourteen hundred. Medieval commerce in Kraków was not conducted on trust alone.

The legend goes that in twelve forty-one, as Mongol horsemen approached Kraków, the watchman in the Trumpet Tower climbed to the top and began playing the hejnal — the warning trumpet call — to alert the city. He had played three verses when a Mongol arrow struck him in the throat, and he fell silent mid-note. To honour his sacrifice, the hejnal has been played every hour from the tower ever since, and it is always cut off at the exact point where the arrow supposedly silenced him.

It is a beautiful story. Historians have traced the specific arrow-in-the-throat version to a nineteen twenty-eight American children's novel, The Trumpeter of Krakow, written by a man named Eric Kelly who had briefly visited Poland. The actual origins of the hejnal are more practical: it was a signal call for opening the city gates, marking the hours, and warning of fires. But the story proved irresistible, and Poles adopted it fully. The hejnal is still played every hour, on the hour, four times in sequence — once from each of the cardinal directions. If you can be in the square at the top of any hour, look up at the taller tower. You will hear it, and you will hear it stop.

Now go inside. The ticket is around fifteen zloty and it is the highest-value admission in Kraków. When you step through the door, the ceiling opens above you into a deep blue universe studded with gold stars. The walls are covered in medieval paintings. Gilded statues line the nave piers. Nineteenth-century stained glass by the great Kraków artists Józef Mehoffer and Stanislaw Wyspianski floods everything with coloured light.

The masterpiece is at the far end. Walk down the central aisle to the high altar. You are looking at the Altarpiece of Veit Stoss — carved between fourteen seventy-seven and fourteen eighty-nine by the Nuremberg sculptor Wit Stwosz, as he is called in Polish. Thirteen metres tall, eleven metres wide, carved from limewood. The central panel depicts the Dormition of the Virgin — her death, surrounded by life-sized apostles, their faces based on actual people Stwosz used as models. You can look at those figures and see fifteenth-century Kraków citizens staring back at you.

In nineteen thirty-nine, the Nazis dismantled the altarpiece and transported it to Nuremberg as plunder. In nineteen forty-five, the American forces recovered it from a castle basement in Bavaria. It was restored and reinstalled here in nineteen fifty-seven, where it has remained.

The Planty is now a sequence of linked green rooms — lawns, tree canopies, benches, fountains, and statues scattered along the path. Students from the Jagiellonian University study here in warm weather. Elderly residents walk their dogs along the gravel paths. In spring the chestnut trees bloom. In winter the bare branches frame the Gothic towers of the churches rising above the park's inner edge.

Walking the full Planty circuit takes about forty-five minutes at a gentle pace. You will not do that now — we are only cutting through a section of it as we head southwest toward the base of Wawel Hill. But take the time to notice the quality of the light in here, the contrast between the green quiet of the park and the stone bustle of the Old Town just inside the tree line. The park exists because a professor told the Austrians it was a necessary windbreak against respiratory illness. The trees still filter the air.

Follow the Planty path southwest for a few minutes. Ahead of you, rising above the rooftops and the park's southern edge, you will see the first limestone crags of Wawel Hill. A long access ramp curves up from the river side. That is where we are headed — up the hill to the place that is, without argument, the most important single location in Poland.

Almost every Polish king from the early fourteen hundreds onward is buried here. The poets Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki are interred in the cathedral crypts. The military hero and American Revolutionary War veteran Tadeusz Kosciuszko is buried here. The composer and statesman Ignacy Paderewski is here. The general Józef Pilsudski, who led the reconstituted Polish state after World War One, is here. When you walk through the gate at the top of this ramp, you are entering Poland's most concentrated deposit of national memory.

Walk slowly through the gate and into the main courtyard. The Romanesque and Gothic walls you see around you represent a thousand years of accumulated building, burning, rebuilding, and adding. The hill has been partially destroyed multiple times — by the Mongols in twelve forty-one, by fires in subsequent centuries, and by wars. What stands today is largely the product of a major Renaissance rebuilding campaign in the early sixteenth century, when King Zygmunt the First imported Italian architects to reconstruct the hill after a catastrophic fire in fifteen oh nine.

Turn and face the cathedral. That is your next stop — and it is the emotional core of this entire walk. But before you go in, stand here for a moment. Look north across the Planty and the Old Town. Look south at the Vistula bending around the base of the hill. Look at the castle walls. You are standing on the place that has been the heart of Poland, on and off, for a thousand years. The weight of that is worth feeling before you go any further.

Go inside. Entry to the nave is included with the general Wawel ticket. The royal crypts beneath require a separate ticket, and they are worth it. Walk down the central aisle and look at the tombs. You are surrounded by sarcophagi of kings and queens going back to the thirteen hundreds. Every major ruler of the Jagiellonian dynasty is here.

Climb to the Sigismund Tower to see the Sigismund Bell — Dzwon Zygmunta — cast in fifteen twenty and weighing almost thirteen tonnes. It is rung only for great state occasions and major church feasts. The sound carries for many kilometres. To ring the bell, volunteers pull on a long rope attached to the clapper; each pull sends the clapper swinging into the bronze wall. It takes multiple people working together, and they say the sound enters your chest.

Come back down and find the stairway to the royal crypts below the nave. Here lie the kings. Here lie Kosciuszko, Paderewski, Pilsudski, Mickiewicz, Slowacki. The crypt feels like the bedrock of a country — the literal underground layer on which everything above was built.

There is no historical evidence for any of this. It is a myth, told to Polish children for approximately a thousand years, and it explains the origin of the city's name in the best possible way — with fire, cleverness, and a dead dragon.

The dragon sculpture was created by the Kraków artist Bronislaw Chromy and installed here in nineteen seventy-two. It is cast in bronze, roughly five metres tall, and it breathes actual fire. A gas line runs up through the base of the sculpture and out through a nozzle in the dragon's open mouth. Every few minutes the flame ignites with a soft whomp and a two-metre jet of fire shoots out over the riverbank. On special occasions, the dragon can be triggered remotely.

The cave itself is real — a natural limestone cavity that has been here since long before the city. You can walk through it on a guided circuit. It is cool, low-ceilinged, and atmospheric, and it comes out on the riverbank directly in front of the dragon sculpture.

Stand here for a moment on the bank of the Vistula. Look back up at the castle walls above you on the cliff face. Look across the river at the flat southern bank. This is where Kraków begins, geologically and mythologically. You are standing at the base of the origin story.

From here, the walk continues south along the river for about a kilometre to Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter. Follow the riverbank path south, or cut inland on Stradomska Street. Either route takes about fifteen minutes on foot.

When the Germans occupied Kraków in September nineteen thirty-nine, they made it the administrative capital of their newly created Generalgouvernement — the occupied Polish territory not directly incorporated into the Reich. Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general, installed himself in Wawel Castle. Kazimierz's Jewish community was forced into a ghetto across the river in Podgorze in nineteen forty-one, and from there the deportations to the death camps began. By nineteen forty-five, the Jewish community of Kraków had been almost entirely destroyed. Of sixty-five thousand people, only a few thousand survived.

The square you are standing in — Plac Nowy, or one of the streets leading off it — is where life continues. The cafés and bars of Kazimierz today attract students and artists and tourists. Zapiekanka stands — open-faced toasted baguettes with mushrooms and cheese — line the round pavilion in Plac Nowy and fill the air with a smell that belongs entirely to this neighbourhood. The Saturday flea market spreads across the square. Young Kraków has made this the city's most creative district.

But walk a little further. Find the Remuh Synagogue on Szeroka Street — one of two still-active synagogues in Kazimierz, built in fifteen fifty-three. The adjacent Remuh Cemetery, one of the oldest surviving Jewish cemeteries in Poland, contains gravestones dating to the fifteen hundreds. In a corner of the cemetery, fragments of headstones shattered during the German occupation have been gathered and reassembled into a wall — the Wailing Wall of Kazimierz — so that the broken pieces of the dead remain part of the community. Walk slowly. Read the names where you can.

Kazimierz is not a museum exhibit. It is a living neighbourhood trying to carry its history forward without being crushed by it. The klezmer musicians who play in the courtyard cafés in the evening are performing music that survived because individuals carried it with them. The Hebrew letters above the doorways of old shops are fading but still there. Kraków is still working out what it means to live in a place where so much was erased, and what it owes to those who were taken from here.

You have walked the full route — from the Barbican to the dragon, from the coronation square to the quarter of the dead and the living. Kraków is one of the great cities of Europe, and now you have walked its spine.