By now, you may have realized this is a remarkable and very pleasant city with a laid back pace. Krakow is a UNESCO City of Literature and one of UNESCO’s original 12 world heritage sites (there are over a thousand significant UNESCO World heritage sights today, and over 800 are cultural – being names in the first dozen is in itself far from trivial).
The scale and detail will both pale in comparison with Prague but overall, the historic capital of Rzech Pospolita wins in this comparison in ostentatiously decorated Italianate church interiors, including Wawel, museums, and food & drink. Not to mention customer service and user friendliness where it wins hands down. Central Europe owes its place in the Renaissance civilization, at least in part, to Krakow, and to Poland’s Italian queen, Bona Sforza. The Jagiellonian dynasty’s patronage of early Renaissance masters – just as the Habsburgs’s sponsorship of the baroque over a century later – graced Central Europe with the Italianate look it still often retains. All in stark contrast to the newly centralized Bourbon France of the 1660’s turned away from Bernini and the peninsula, choosing to focus its state patronage instead on self-proclaimed artistic supremacy.
Don’t look for big city architecture of a 19th century capital city here, you won’t find it –Krakow last basked in the splendor of a major royal court in 1596 – during the liberal Grunderzeit and Modernist decades it remained in the shadow of Lwow, my hometown and at the time the capital of Galicia, the Habsburg crownland to which Krakow belonged, known as Lemberg. The ancient Polish capital started to become metropolitan at the end of the 19th century, steadily but surely – but more steadily than surely. The transformation started late – too late to enjoy its new status of a big city before WWI – so Krakow managed to preserve its authentic character, skyline, and the relationships between structures and enclosed negative spaces with meticulous attention to detail.
Very young population, full 28% of population are students – the place is very safe, prices are low at the moment (until it becomes the next Berlin or at least the next Prague), add to that Poland’s beautiful people (Me Too movement forced me to edit this), and multiple languages spoken in the service sector, and there should be little to complain about.
Decent pedestrian life given size, vibrant outdoor café and jazz scene, the coffee culture of old Habsburg Europe – w/o huge tourist crowds – some great food and nice restaurants, I remember it being very user friendly. Multiply this times x to account for the Easter weekend, and you will get the picture.
More of a Florence, Ghent or Antwerp experience, you are going to love it – most of what’s on display here is pre-modern (pre-18th century), with some monuments to post Enlightenment institutions sprinkled in. Its golden age was from 1300’s to early 1600’s when it was the royal capital. At the time when Poland was the 2nd largest country by population in Europe (second after Habsburg Spain of Charles V or Philip II in the 1500’s, and maybe third after the newly unified France of Louis XIII and Louis XIV in the 1600’s; for context, Poland’s population was at the time double the size of England and triple that of the newly minted United Provinces of the Netherlands, but not sure if that even matters).
Also one of the earlier experiments with limited democracies where post 1570’s kings were elected by vote of the nobility and prominent cities in the Sejm (parliament). This democratic republic of the nobles was an attempt to replicate the governance structure of the city republics of the Renaissance Italy and Flanders. With the benefit of hindsight, it is no surprise the political structure of a city state might not to scale up well when applied to a country of that size. Note that Poland launched its elected kingdom experiment decades before the conclusion of the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia, the point when the model of a city state conclusively lost – regrettably, along with that of a supranational empire, – to the model of a monoethnic nation state. For context, multiply the country’s population of 10 million by the share of the total headcount represented by the Polish nobility (at 10%, one of Europe’s highest rates), and you will get the picture of the electorate. In addition to the nobles, the leading cities (Krakow, Lwow, Vilna) also held important votes in these elections. Unfortunately, a bit ahead of its day, especially given the opposite trend towards absolutism and centralization of rapidly consolidating Russia, aggressive Prussia, and resurgent – after loss of Silesia – Holy Roman Empire (Austria): less than two centuries later, the Polish experiment led to – a strong but fragmented periphery and a center devoid of power – the three partitions that wiped it off the political maps until 1918. Krakow found itself in the most tolerant, polyglot, and multiethnic of the three successor parts, the Austrian one.
Krakow’s Rynek Sq is Europe’s largest medieval square is remains the epicenter of its everyday life – day and night – and is very civilized, well proportioned, elegant, and extremely well-articulated. Historical monuments are generally in a great shape. I would not leave any stones – or courtyards, nooks and crannies – unturned here, the angle, composition, and image all meaningfully change with every step here. Choose your points of view wisely – include rooftop terraces, top of Sukiennice hall, and high floor windows on and around the square – these and some drone photos will all add greatly to your experience here.
Green space is never too far – until delayed modernization initiatives of the 2H19c, the city was mostly a living museum, its population small, its industry nonexistent. Its old fortifications were ultimately replaced by a beautiful park – Planty – in contrast to larger cities where the negative space left by the demolition between the inner city and the old suburbs would inevitably get filled by a ring boulevard, flanked by rows of imposing buildings. Krakow in this sense is similar to Lucca except the near circular park is at street level and more thoroughly integrated into every day city life.
The park that encircles the old center, Planty, is really a chain of 30 smaller gardens in various styles but mostly English – picture Madison Sq park that loops around the inner city – and a great place to chill out with a newspaper. The Juliusz Slowacki Opera Theater and Jagellonian University, founded in the 1364 and C Europe’s second oldest after Prague’s, are both in this park. I suggest using it for a jog, an occasional lengthwise/circular stroll, or to cut in and out of the medieval center (just pick a different section each time you cross it).
Extremely walkable, centralized, dense, happening, and super compact, the inner city area is barely 2-3 blocks wide, measured from the Rynek sq, to the inner circumference of Planty. You literally don’t need to leave the area inside Planty except for the axis following the old Royal road along plac Matejki to Wawel castle via Barbakan, Florian Gate, ul Florianska and Grodzka.
To avoid squandering a great opportunity to see some of the most amazing church interiors outside Italy, you may need to go inside some churches and a museum or two. The good thing is the former are very actively used by the devout Catholic locals and the latter are high caliber yet very quiet, sort of the opposite of what causes fatigued with travelers. I recommend a church crawl during Sunday morning mass or an evening service. Wawel royal caste and cathedral as well as dozens of churches in the city have world class art, small museums – some with top names.
Kazimierz, the historical Jewish ghetto, is tight next to Wawel, the royal castle complex, so you have some synergy potential – check out some of the finest Renaissance art N of the Alps at the Wawel’s Sigismund Chapel and get a taste for old Jewish Krakow that no longer exists, but is dutifully celebrated as a cultural phenomenon by the Kazimierz festivals, in one shot. The jazz and klezmer music scene is big here but need to check the calendar.
If you have time, Wroclaw and Gdansk (may be a bit too far to include in a long weekend trip) also offer stunning architectural detail and are unusual, imposing cities, meticulously restored, with riveting architectural detail, and a split personality – a number of lesser towns and religious sites would be a nice extension of the itinerary if more than a weekend – but even if not, Krakow by itself is awesome. Wroclaw is a capital of Silesia, historically Polish then Habsburg, before Maria Theresia lost it in 1740 to Prussia, and ultimately reclaimed from Germany by the Soviet Union for Poland after WWII in compensation for annexing Eastern Poland (that city received 300,000 repatriated Polish citizens from Lwow in the early 1950s, my hometown, after Stalin allowed them to leave the areas annexed by the Russians), consider it if you get bored with Zakopane and the High Tatras.
Enjoy!
