Kraków: The Royal Route — Barbican to Wawel

This particular Barbican was built around fourteen ninety-eight, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was rolling through the Balkans and Central Europe was genuinely terrified. The gothic king Jan Olbracht of Poland commissioned it after the failed Bukovinian campaign against the Turks. He wanted the northern gate of his capital to hold out against anything. Turns out, he was right to worry. A century and a half later, the Ottomans would reach the gates of Vienna. They never got to Kraków, in part because they never got past this kind of thing.

The Barbican has four levels. The lowest is the dungeon, the second is the gatehouse, the third is a wooden gallery for archers, and the top is a crenellated rampart for the watch. In good weather, you can walk through the interior and climb to the top. It's open April through October for a few zloty.

Now here's the weirdest piece of trivia about this place. In seventeen ninety-four, the Polish general Tadeusz Kosciuszko led an uprising against the Russian occupation of Poland. When the Russians eventually overran the country and the uprising collapsed, they decided the Kraków city walls needed to come down, along with this Barbican. The plan went through. Demolition began. By eighteen seventeen, most of the old medieval walls had been torn down. They were only stopped from demolishing the Barbican and the Florian Gate behind it by one man: Professor Feliks Radwanski of the Jagiellonian University. He persuaded the Austrian authorities who then controlled Kraków that the Barbican was an essential windbreak that protected the citizens of the city from respiratory illness. That's right. He saved the Barbican by claiming it was medically necessary. They believed him. The Barbican stayed.

The city walls were replaced with a green ring park called the Planty, which you can see all around you. That park traces the exact line of the vanished medieval walls, and walking the full Planty loop takes about an hour.

When you're ready, walk south through the Barbican's outer gate. You'll see a short walled passage leading to another, smaller gate on the other side. That gate is the north face of Kraków's old city, and it's our next stop.

The gate is named for Saint Florian, a third-century Roman soldier and Christian martyr who was drowned in a river in what is now Austria for refusing to renounce his faith. He's the patron saint of firefighters and of Poland, and also, weirdly, of brewers. You can see his statue in the niche on the outer face of the gate. He's holding a flag in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. He's been standing there since the fifteen hundreds.

The gate itself is around thirty-three metres tall, making it one of the tallest surviving medieval gatehouses in Poland. It dates from around fourteen hundred. The base is fourteenth-century stone, and the upper levels and the baroque copper helmet on top were added over the next few hundred years as the defensive needs changed.

Now look at the wall hanging from the inside of the gate as you pass through. You'll see an enormous framed image of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the most revered religious icon in Poland. That painting, which is supposedly a portrait of the Virgin Mary made by Saint Luke himself on the cedar table from Jesus's family home, has been housed at the monastery of Jasna Gora for over six hundred years and is considered the spiritual patroness of the Polish nation. The copy here is a nineteenth-century gesture, placed by citizens who wanted pilgrims and returning soldiers to pass beneath her blessing when they entered the city.

Now walk through the gate onto the street on the other side. The scene changes immediately. You've left the Planty park and you're suddenly on a narrow medieval street lined with four-storey townhouses and art galleries. Baroque facades. Gothic doorways. Painters with easels set up along the walls. That's Floriańska, the spine of old Kraków, and that's where we're headed now.

About halfway down the street, on the right, you'll come to number forty-five — sorry, I keep catching myself. Number forty-five on the left. On the right, at number forty-three, is the city's most famous literary cafe: Jama Michalika. Step inside if you have five minutes. The interior is pure Art Nouveau, decorated between nineteen oh five and nineteen twelve by artists of the Zielony Balonik, the Green Balloon cabaret, which was Poland's equivalent of Paris's Chat Noir. Stained glass, marionette puppets, and walls covered in caricature drawings of the artists and politicians of Austrian-era Kraków. The coffee is average but the atmosphere is a century of preserved bohemia.

Two doors down, at number forty-one, is the Czartoryski Museum, which houses the single most valuable object in Poland: Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, painted around fourteen eighty-nine. It's one of only four surviving Leonardo paintings of women. If you have an hour later in your trip, go see it. We won't cover it on this walk, but it's two minutes off the route.

Now, a student history note. In fourteen ninety-one, a teenager from Torun named Nicholas Copernicus arrived in Kraków to study at the Jagiellonian University. He was eighteen years old. For four years, he lived in student lodgings somewhere along or just off this street, walked this exact stretch of Floriańska daily to get to his lectures at the Collegium Maius a few blocks ahead of us, and studied philosophy, mathematics, and the beginnings of what he would later formalise as heliocentric astronomy. The idea that the Earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around — that idea was beginning to take shape in Copernicus's head right here, on this street, between fourteen ninety-one and fourteen ninety-five. He would leave Kraków for further study in Italy and then return to Warmia, where, in fifteen forty-three, on his deathbed, he would finally publish the book that rewrote humanity's place in the cosmos.

Continue south along Floriańska. You'll see the street open up ahead into an enormous paved expanse. That's the Rynek, the Main Market Square, and it will genuinely take your breath away.

The square was laid out in twelve fifty-seven, after the Mongol invasion of twelve forty-one had destroyed the earlier medieval town. The Mongols under Batu Khan rode through the Carpathians, reached Kraków, burned it to the ground. When the city was rebuilt sixteen years later under Duke Boleslaw the Chaste, the planners took the opportunity to redesign the whole medieval town on a perfect grid around this gigantic central square. The grid and the square have been here ever since.

Look around at what frames you. The enormous brick basilica with the two mismatched towers on the eastern side of the square is Saint Mary's, our next stop. The long yellow Renaissance building in the middle of the square, with the open arcades on the ground floor, is the Sukiennice, the Cloth Hall, where medieval merchants sold textiles imported from Flanders and silk from the Orient, and where today you can buy amber jewellery and carved chess sets. The tall thin tower on the southwestern corner of the square is the Town Hall Tower, the only surviving piece of the original Kraków town hall, which was demolished in eighteen twenty. You can climb that tower for three zloty for one of the best views in the city.

Walk over to the base of the Town Hall Tower now, and look at the pavement. You'll find a brass plaque embedded in the stones marked with a stylised circle and a date. That's the Kosciuszko Oath Plaque. On the twenty-fourth of March, seventeen ninety-four, the Polish general Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who had fought alongside George Washington in the American Revolution and who would go on to become a national hero, stood on this exact spot and publicly swore an oath to lead an uprising against the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian powers that had been partitioning Poland. The uprising eventually failed. Poland was wiped off the map for a hundred and twenty-three years. But the oath happened here, and Poles have not forgotten it.

Now walk toward the centre of the square, toward the Cloth Hall, and look for a bronze statue on the eastern side of the Cloth Hall. That's Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's greatest Romantic poet, the Polish equivalent of Lord Byron and Walt Whitman combined. The statue was unveiled in eighteen ninety-eight, the hundredth anniversary of Mickiewicz's birth. The Nazis dynamited it in nineteen forty. It was rebuilt in nineteen fifty-five from pieces and reference photographs. If someone in Kraków says "I'll meet you under Adam," this is where they mean. Generations of Kraków residents have kissed their first kisses and broken up with their first loves under Adam's thoughtful bronze gaze.

When you're ready, walk toward the great brick basilica with the two towers. Its entrance is on the southwestern corner of the church. Go inside if you can — the ticket is five zloty, and it's essential. That's our next stop.

Here's the legend. It says that in twelve forty-one, as Mongol horsemen thundered toward Kraków, the watchman in the Trumpet Tower spotted them approaching, climbed to the top, and played a warning call on his trumpet. Halfway through the third verse, a Mongol arrow pierced his throat and he fell silent. To honour his sacrifice, the hejnal, the trumpet call, has been played hourly from the tower ever since, always cut off mid-note at the exact spot where the legendary arrow supposedly struck.

It's a beautiful story. Now, here's the embarrassing truth. Historians have traced the arrow-in-the-throat version of the story to a nineteen twenty-eight American children's book called The Trumpeter of Krakow, written by a man named Eric P. Kelly who had visited Poland briefly. The actual medieval origin of the hejnal has nothing to do with the Mongols. It was simply a signal to open and close the city gates, to mark the hours, and to warn of fires. But the arrow story is so good that Poles adopted it. The hejnal is still played every hour, on the hour, from a window in the Trumpet Tower, and it is still cut off mid-note. If you can, be in the square at the top of the hour and look up. You'll hear it four times, once from each cardinal direction.

Now go inside the church. The ticket is fifteen zloty, and it is the single highest-value ticket in Kraków. When you step through the door, the ceiling explodes into a cosmos of deep blue paint studded with gold stars. The walls are covered in medieval paintings. Gilded statues line the piers. Stained glass windows, most of them nineteenth-century by the great Kraków artists Jozef Mehoffer and Stanislaw Wyspianski, flood the space with coloured light.

The masterpiece is at the far end. Walk down the central aisle and look at the high altar. You're looking at the Altarpiece of Veit Stoss, carved between fourteen seventy-seven and fourteen eighty-nine by the German sculptor Wit Stwosz, as the Poles call him. It is thirteen metres tall and eleven metres wide, made of limewood, and it is considered the greatest Gothic wooden sculpture in Europe. The central panel shows the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, the moment of her death, and it contains life-sized figures of the apostles gathered around her. The faces are genuinely individual portraits of Kraków burghers of the fourteen eighties — Stoss used real people as models. You can look at them and see fifteenth-century Polish merchants staring back at you.

In nineteen thirty-nine, the Nazis dismantled the altarpiece and shipped it to Nuremberg as loot. In nineteen forty-five, the American Third Army recovered it from a castle basement where it had been hidden. It was restored in Poland and reinstalled in this church in nineteen fifty-seven. It has been here ever since.

When you're done inside, exit and walk across the square toward the long yellow Renaissance building in the middle. That's our next stop.

The Kraków city council decided not to rebuild in Gothic style. Poland was experiencing its Renaissance, the so-called Golden Age of Polish culture. So the new Cloth Hall was built between fifteen sixty-one and fifteen seventy-three by the Italian architect Giovanni Maria Mosca, known in Poland as Giovanni il Padovano. He roofed the two Gothic rows with a single magnificent Renaissance attic in the Polish mannerist style, featuring those distinctive stone flourishes known as parapet gables. The ornamental metalwork on the arcades is a later addition from the eighteen seventies, when the architect Tomasz Pryliński gave the building a loving neo-Renaissance restoration.

Walk through the ground-floor arcade. Inside, the central corridor is still lined with market stalls selling everything Kraków is known for. Amber jewellery from the Baltic coast. Linden-wood boxes. Wooden chess sets carved by mountain villagers in Zakopane. Embroidered cloth. Silver jewellery. Tourist kitsch, yes, but also some genuinely nice craftwork if you look carefully. Bargaining is acceptable but mild; the sellers have heard every trick.

The upstairs is where the surprise is. The entire upper floor of the Sukiennice houses the National Museum's gallery of nineteenth-century Polish painting. It is free of foreign tourists because almost nobody knows it's here. Inside, you'll find the heart of Polish Romantic and historical painting — Jan Matejko's enormous eighteen seventy-eight canvas "Prussian Homage," depicting the Duke of Prussia kneeling in this very square before the Polish king in fifteen twenty-five; Witold Pruszkowski's Slavic mythology scenes; Henryk Siemiradzki's classical allegories. Entry is fifteen zloty. If you give me ninety minutes, I promise it will be the most important thing you do in Poland.

One more detail before we move on. At the eastern end of the Cloth Hall, on the ground floor, you'll find a small glass case mounted on the wall. Inside is a slab of iron with a chain attached to it. This is the Zelazo Kupieckie, the Merchant's Iron, the medieval weights-and-measures standard against which all Kraków's merchants had to calibrate their scales. It's been bolted to this wall since around fourteen hundred. The Cloth Hall also once contained a stocks and pillory at the eastern end, where merchants caught cheating customers were chained up for public humiliation. A small knife hanging from a chain on the outer wall, called the Nozyk Krakowski, was used to nail rogue merchants' ears to wooden boards. Really. Medieval commerce in Kraków was not a subtle business.

Now, leave the Sukiennice through the western arcades. Cross the square toward the western edge and head south. You'll see a narrow street called ulica Sw. Anny. Walk down it. After about two hundred metres, you'll see a sober Gothic building with a courtyard on your left. That's our next stop, and it's the oldest university building in Poland.

Then, in thirteen eighty-six, something extraordinary happened. The Polish throne passed through marriage to the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila, who was baptised as Wladyslaw and married the eleven-year-old Polish queen Jadwiga. Jadwiga was an astonishing person — a child queen, a devout Christian, politically brilliant, and a lover of learning. When she died in childbirth in thirteen ninety-nine at the age of twenty-five, she left her entire personal fortune, including her crown and jewels, to the University of Kraków to ensure its survival.

The university reopened in fourteen hundred, refounded on her bequest, and has been known as the Jagiellonian University, the Jagiellonska, ever since, after the Lithuanian-Polish royal dynasty. It's never closed since. This courtyard dates to the fourteen hundreds, rebuilt after a fire in fourteen ninety-two.

Now, the famous student. In fourteen ninety-one, an eighteen-year-old from the Polish city of Torun named Mikolaj Kopernik — known to the rest of the world by his Latinised name, Nicholas Copernicus — enrolled at the Jagiellonian University. He studied here from fourteen ninety-one to fourteen ninety-five, four years, during which he took courses in philosophy, mathematics, Aristotelian physics, and astronomy under some of the most advanced teachers in Europe. He never graduated from Kraków — he left to continue his studies at Bologna — but the four years he spent here, in and around these arcades, were where the intellectual foundations of the heliocentric theory were laid. He would finally publish his great book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in fifteen forty-three, as he lay dying. That book ended fifteen hundred years of earth-centred cosmology.

The Collegium Maius is also a museum now. It holds the university's historical instruments — medieval astrolabes, a globe from around fifteen ten that has the oldest known terrestrial mapping of America, alchemical glassware, academic robes dating back six centuries, and the Oscar statuette donated by the director Andrzej Wajda. Entry is fifteen zloty. The guided tours are in Polish and English, and they take about forty-five minutes.

Other notable alumni of the Jagiellonian include Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul the Second, who studied here from nineteen thirty-eight to nineteen thirty-nine before the Nazi invasion shut the university down, and who returned to finish his theology degree in nineteen forty-six. We'll see his window in two stops.

When you're done, leave the Collegium Maius courtyard through the south side, walk one block, then turn left on ulica Bracka and walk east. After about two hundred metres, you'll see a Gothic brick church with a tall spire on your right. That's the Franciscan Basilica, and that's where we're going.

The reconstruction after the eighteen fifty fire is why we're here. In eighteen ninety-five, the Franciscans commissioned Stanislaw Wyspianski, the young star of the Kraków modernist movement known as Mloda Polska, Young Poland, to design new stained glass for the basilica. Wyspianski was a genius — a painter, a poet, a playwright, a theatre designer, and one of the most important figures in Polish art. For the Franciscans he produced some of the greatest Art Nouveau stained glass in Europe.

Go inside, turn around, and look at the enormous window above the main entrance. That's "Let There Be" — depicting God the Father in the act of creation, hands extended, light exploding outward, surrounded by stylised Art Nouveau flowers and cosmic imagery. It's genuinely, physically overwhelming. Now walk toward the altar and look for the smaller windows in the chancel — Saint Salomea, Saint Francis, and the Blessed Kinga. Wyspianski's use of colour, his blending of Christian iconography with Slavic folk art, his compositional daring — this is why the Franciscan Basilica is a pilgrimage site for anyone interested in Art Nouveau.

Now, back outside. Cross the street directly in front of the basilica and look up at the building at number three Franciszkanska, the Bishop's Palace. Specifically, look at the second-floor corner window facing the intersection. You'll see a stone cross mounted above the window and a wooden grille frame around the glass. That is the Papal Window.

Karol Wojtyla became the Archbishop of Kraków in nineteen sixty-four. For the next fourteen years, until he was elected Pope John Paul the Second in October nineteen seventy-eight, he lived in this palace. Whenever he appeared at the corner window, which was often, crowds would gather below to see him. After nineteen seventy-eight, when he returned to Kraków on papal visits, he continued to appear at this window, and the crowds grew to hundreds of thousands. The papal visits of nineteen seventy-nine, nineteen eighty-three, nineteen eighty-seven, nineteen ninety-one, nineteen ninety-seven, and two thousand and two all featured addresses from this window.

During the Communist era in the nineteen eighties, gatherings at this window became quiet acts of political resistance. After John Paul's death in two thousand and five, the window became a national shrine. On the day of his death, hundreds of thousands of Kraków residents gathered here with candles and prayed in silence under the darkened window. A bronze relief on the palace wall below the window commemorates that night.

When you're ready, continue walking south on ulica Grodzka. Grodzka is the continuation of the Royal Route, and it leads directly to the base of Wawel Hill.

Continue past Peter and Paul. A few steps later, on the right, is a small, almost apologetic-looking Romanesque building. That's Saint Andrew's Church, Kosciol Swietego Andrzeja. It doesn't look like much — it's squat, stone, with two small towers and narrow windows. But what you're looking at is a genuine medieval survivor.

Saint Andrew's was built between ten seventy-nine and ten ninety-eight. That's eleventh century. It predates the Gothic churches around it by two hundred years. And here's the remarkable thing: when the Mongols sacked Kraków in twelve forty-one and burned the city to the ground, Saint Andrew's was the only building in the city that did not fall. The townspeople locked themselves inside, and the church's three-metre-thick stone walls and slit windows high above ground level meant the Mongols couldn't breach it. It's the only surviving piece of pre-Mongol Kraków in the entire city.

Now turn right off Grodzka onto a curving narrow street called ulica Kanonicza, Canon Street. This is the oldest street in Kraków, and in my opinion the most beautiful. It was built in the fourteenth century as the home of the cathedral canons — the senior clergy of Wawel Cathedral, who needed houses near the cathedral but outside its walls. They built grand mansions here, most of them Gothic, later rebuilt in Renaissance and Baroque styles. Thirty-plus mansions, all with little courtyards, some with original medieval masonry behind later plaster.

Number nineteen is the house where Karol Wojtyla lived for most of his years as a young Kraków priest, from nineteen fifty-one to nineteen sixty-three. It's now a small museum called the Archdiocesan Museum, dedicated to his life.

Kanonicza ends at the base of Wawel Hill. The street curves upward, the buildings open out, and suddenly you're looking up at the massive Romanesque and Renaissance walls of the Royal Castle. That's our last stop, and it's the emotional climax of any walk through Kraków.

Start with the cathedral. Katedra Wawelska has a confused, beautiful exterior — a Romanesque base from the ten hundreds, a Gothic core from the thirteen hundreds, a Renaissance dome from the fifteen hundreds, a Baroque chapel wing, and a neo-Gothic restoration. The church has been rebuilt and added to continuously for over a thousand years. Inside, every corner is a tomb. Royal sarcophagi line the main aisle. Kings lie under the floor. The Sigismund Chapel, with its gilded copper dome built by the Italian master Bartolommeo Berrecci between fifteen nineteen and fifteen thirty-three, is considered one of the finest examples of Italian Renaissance architecture anywhere outside of Italy.

Pay the fifteen zloty to go inside. Climb the Sigismund Tower to see the enormous Sigismund Bell, cast in fifteen twenty, weighing almost thirteen tons. It is only rung for state occasions, and the sound is said to be audible for fifty kilometres. The royal crypts below the cathedral contain the tombs of most of the kings of Poland.

Now walk south across the grand central square toward the Royal Castle. The castle is built around a Renaissance arcaded courtyard, redone in the fifteen hundreds by Italian architects in what was essentially a Florentine style. King Sigismund the First, Zygmunt Stary, imported the entire Italian Renaissance to Poland by hiring Italian masters to rebuild Wawel after a fire in fifteen oh nine. What you're walking through is the result — a tiny slice of Florence on a Polish hilltop.

The State Rooms are visitable. The Royal Treasury holds Szczerbiec, the twelfth-century coronation sword of Poland, nicked in one edge by the legendary blow that opened the Golden Gate of Kiev in ten eighteen. The Armoury displays Ottoman weapons taken after Jan Sobieski's defeat of the Turks at Vienna in sixteen eighty-three.

Now, finally, walk to the southwest side of the hill and look for the path down to the Vistula River. At the base of the cliff, on the riverbank, is a cave called the Smocza Jama, the Dragon's Den, and in front of the cave stands a bronze sculpture by Bronislaw Chromy, installed in nineteen seventy-two. It is a six-headed dragon, three metres tall, cast in bronze. And it breathes actual fire.

Here is the legend. A long time ago, before the city existed, a dragon lived in the cave beneath this hill. It terrorised the local farmers, demanded a tribute of virgins, and generally made life miserable. The local king, Krak, offered his daughter to any man who could slay the dragon. Every brave knight who tried to fight the dragon was eaten. Until one day, a humble cobbler named Skuba came forward with an idea. Skuba killed a sheep, stuffed it with sulfur and herbs, and left it at the mouth of the dragon's cave. The dragon ate the sheep whole. The sulfur caught fire in its belly. The dragon was so thirsty it ran down to the Vistula and drank and drank, trying to put out the fire. It drank so much that its belly burst and it died. The king married his daughter to the cobbler, and the grateful townspeople built the first city on this hill, naming it Krak-ow — Krak's town — in his honour.

There is no historical evidence for any of this. It's just a fantastic story that has been told to Polish children for a thousand years. Nonetheless, the dragon breathes fire. Activated by a gas flame, the nozzle in the dragon's mouth shoots a two-metre flame roughly every five to ten minutes, and on holidays it goes off to a musical triggering when someone SMS-texts the dragon's phone number. Yes, the dragon has a mobile phone.

And this is where the walk ends. You've walked the Royal Route. You've seen what every king of Poland saw between his swearing-in at the Barbican gate and his coronation inside Wawel Cathedral. You've passed the altarpiece the Nazis stole, the square where Kosciuszko swore to liberate Poland, the university Copernicus attended, the window where the Polish Pope waved, and the cave where the dragon died. Take a deep breath. Look out over the Vistula. Watch the dragon. You are standing in one of the cultural capitals of Europe. Welcome.