“Nie od razu Kraków zbudowano “(“Kraków was not built in a day” – Polish saying)
Back in 2020 I had booked a family holiday to travel through Poland to Ukraine, which had to be cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. With travel to Ukraine now off-limits, we decided to amend this to a trip just around Poland. My son who is now at university would not be able to accompany us, but, as he has made a number of Polish friends, he undertook a journey to the country a month before us to visit some of them, and was able to provide us with useful information about a number of the cities we intended to visit. My wife and I had visited Poland in 1992 in the immediate post-communist era as part of an Interrail trip to Germany, Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and my 2018 Chess Train trip had called at Warsaw and Kraków. In 2018 I had been amazed by the transformation of the country compared with my experience in 1992, and although I had briefed my wife on the changes she was to be equally astounded by the differences she saw this time.
Day 1 – Monday 10th October 2022 – London to Kraków
As we had booked a lunchtime flight from Stansted Airport, there was no need for the pre-dawn departure that has been a feature of so many of my other trips. The other advantage of a later departure is that we could use our 60+ Railcards to get a discount on a post 0930 Stansted Express train (which disgracefully does not let you use Railcards on advance tickets). The Stansted Express is also still only running its Covid timetable of departures every half hour, rather than the previous every 15 minute service, which means you have to be more careful about catching your intended train.
Stansted Airport was not too crowded and the plane departed on time at 1320. It landed early at Kraków Airport two hours later at 1620 (local time) and just 10 minutes after landing, having smoothly gone through immigration (both of us now having EU passports), we were on the platform of the railway station adjoining Kraków Airport. The ticket machine didn’t want to accept my credit card to buy a ticket, but we were able to buy one from the conductor on board. The 1643 train took us to Kraków Główny station, arriving at 1700. From there it was just a short walk through the gleaming shopping centre to the hotel we had booked.
After we had checked in to the hotel, we walked into the centre of the Old Town to admire the impressive Rynek (main square), before going to find somewhere to eat. We chose a restaurant near the city walls, where we shared a platter of cold meat, cheese and pickle to start with, followed by two different types of pierogi.
Day 2 – Tuesday 11th October 2022 – Kraków
We again returned to the Rynek in the morning to savour the beauty of the place before it got too crowded. While it did fill up later, it was not as busy as when I came here in October 2018. I understand that tourism to Poland is depressed this year compared with other places in Europe, probably due to concerns about its proximity to Ukraine.
Tuesday is the day for free admission to many of the museums in Kraków, and we had planned our activities to make the most of it. When we had been researching the detail of what to do on this trip a couple of weeks before we came, we were disappointed to find that the Rynek Underground exhibition that I had visited four years earlier was due to be closed from Monday to Wednesday of the week we were here. However, from our looking at the entrance first thing on this morning there was no mention of this closure and checking online again we found that the previous reference to the closure had been removed. Although it was a free admission day, you still needed to obtain a ticket – for the Underground Rynek, tickets are obtained at a different location to the entrance, on the other side of the Cloth Hall. After walking around Kraków until the ticket office was due to open at 10am, we were dismayed to find a queue of people waiting for it to open. The queue moved quite slowly – I think because some people were trying to get tickets for times other than immediate admission, as we were given our tickets as soon as we reached the head of the queue.
The Rynek Underground is a superb display of the findings from excavations of the main market square, which opened for the first time in 2010. It was just as good as I remembered it from my previous visit and was not very busy. There was a well-behaved school party of young children in the exhibition at the same time as us, shepherded by a group of nuns. Within the exhibition there was an audio-visual presentation of the history of Kraków. Of the four cities that we were visiting on this trip, Kraków was the only one to ever have been part of the Austrian Empire.
Next stop was the Princes Czartoryski Museum which houses a collection of art largely collected by the son and grandson of Princess Izabela Czartoryska, which had been plundered by various ruling powers over the centuries, most recently by the Nazis. Some of the original collection has never been recovered. The most famous exhibit is Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, which had been treated as almost his own personal property by Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of the General Government in Poland. It was found in his Bavarian country house at the end of WWII.
We then went to the Museum of Kraków, housed in the Krzysztofory Palace located in the Rynek. This portrays the history of the city and is spread over several floors within the building. After a couple of hours in the Krzysztofory Palace, we went to the the upper floors of the Sukiennice (or Cloth Hall) which dominates the centre of the Rynek and which houses a collection of 19th Century Polish Art. Part of the reason for going there was to get a view of the Rynek from a different perspective, but that could only be done by sneaking onto the terrace of the museum’s cafe for a quick look.
Our final visit to a location on the Rynek was to St. Mary’s Basilica, from whose tower a truncated bugle call is played every hour. It has a magnificent Gothic altar with a wooden altarpiece carved by the German sculptor Veit Stoss in the 15th Century. After visiting the body of the church we climbed the tall bell tower for views over the Rynek and beyond.
On our way back to our hotel we made our final museum visit of the day to Jan Matejko’s House. Jan Matejko was a 19th Century Polish painter who specialised in large canvasses depicting significant scenes from Polish history, often with some artistic licence – for example, including characters who were known not to be alive during the event being depicted. The museum is located in the house in Florianska Street (the main street through Kraków’s old town) in which he was born and died. The building includes his studio where many of his pictures were painted.
In the evening we ate on the edge of the old town – I had borscht with dumplings to start, followed by pork schnitzel (described as pork chop on the menu) with mashed potato and pickled cabbage. We remembered our first visit to the city in 1992, when the old town was completely dead at night and there were very few places open to get something to eat.
Day 3 – Wednesday 12th October 2022 – Kraków
Unlike on my previous solo trips we were having breakfast in our hotel each morning. The breakfast room in Kraków was crowded on each day we were there, as there seemed to be several school parties staying in the hotel who came for breakfast about the same time as us.
After breakfast we walked through the old town to the south to reach the Wawel, situated on a hill overlooking the Vistula, where there is the cathedral and castle. First stop was the cathedral, which opened at 9am. We obtained an audio tour, which took us not only through the main body of the church, but also up the bell tower and into the crypt. The crypt contains the tombs of monarchs, presidents and other notable Poles, including Jan Sobieski (defeater of the Turks at the Battle of Vienna in 1683) and Lech Kaczyński (the president of Poland who died in an air crash in 2010 when travelling to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre).
Across from the cathedral is a small museum containing the treasury and a collection of artefacts relating to Pope John Paul II, who had previously been Archbishop of Kraków.
The main castle of the Wawel consists of a lot of different parts which you can visit separately, each requiring its own ticket. Alternatively, as we did, you can book a guided tour, which lasts over two hours to give you an an overview of the whole castle complex. The tour took us through the castle’s museum and armoury, before visiting the private apartments and state rooms. At the time of our visit there was also a special exhibition ‘The Art of the Orient‘, including a large Turkish tent. The final stop on the tour was to a more modern building, which had been constructed by the Nazis as the administrative headquarters for the General Government, which had been based in the Wawel.
After our guided tour we visited the Dragon’s Den, a series of caves that run underneath the hill on which the Wawel is situated. You enter via a steep staircase on the top of the hill and emerge at the level of the Vistula river, where there is sculptured dragon that periodically emits fire from its mouth.
From the exit from the cave we walked along the Vistula river to visit the Kazimierz district of the the city, which is the historic Jewish area in Kraków. In 1941 the Nazis forcibly removed the Jews from Kazimierz to a ghetto on the other side of the river, and most did not survive the war. When we visited here in 1992 it seemed seemed very quiet and run down, but it now has a livelier, almost Bohemian, feel to it. While in Kazimierz, we visited the Old Synagogue, which we had also visited thirty years previously.
That evening we ate in another restaurant just inside the city walls, not far from the one we used on our first night in Kraków, specialising in traditional Galician dishes. To start with I had grilled Oscypek cheese, followed by wild boar with deep fried broccoli. At the end of the meal we were each given a glass of apple flavoured vodka.
Day 4 – Thursday 13th October 2022 – Kraków to Wrocław
On our final morning Kraków we first went to the university area. The Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364, is the oldest in Poland – alumni have ranged from Nicolaus Copernicus through to Pope John Paul II. The core of the old university is located within the old town and we visited the courtyard of the Collegium Maius, the oldest part of the university.
After a final wander through the Rynek, we went to the Barbican, the round fortification which guards the northern entrance to the old town and which we had walked past every day on our way to and from our hotel. You can walk round the inner wall and get views over Kraków, but apart from a few information boards about the history of the structure there was not a great deal within the Barbican to detain us too long.
It was then time to go back to the hotel to collect our bags and make our way to Kraków Główny in good time for our 1212 departure. In the shopping centre, which is an integral part of the station, I bought a filled roll to eat for lunch on the train.
The train to Wrocław departed on time, but arrived in Wrocław 15 minutes late at 1530. We were travelling in a first class compartment, which had five out the six seats occupied for the journey. For all the intercity trips in Poland we had pre-booked tickets when they first went on sale a month in advance, taking advantage of the 30% discount for people over 60. The fares were very reasonable being only about £10 each for a three hour first class journey.
Our hotel in Wrocław was opposite the splendidly crenellated Wrocław Główny station, which conveniently allowed us to drop off our bags before setting off to explore the city.
Wrocław had been the German city of Breslau up until the end of World War II. Following the redrawing of Europe’s borders agreed at the Potsdam Conference of 1945, Breslau and the surrounding parts of Silesia were transferred to Poland and the remaining German inhabitants expelled. Wrocław was then populated with Poles from the eastern parts of the country that had been annexed by the Soviet Union, most notably from Lviv in Ukraine. When this trip to Poland had first been booked, and then cancelled due to Covid, in 2020 we were going to go to Lviv. As a visit to Ukraine was no longer possible it seemed apposite to visit Wrocław, especially since the Poles expelled from Lviv brought many of their cultural artefacts with them to Wrocław.
On our way to the city centre we looked in on St Mary Magdalene, which has a high-level bridge connecting the two towers of the church. From there we went to the Rynek which has rather more buildings than the one in Kraków including the Old Town Hall, originally dating from the 13th Century.
We ate that evening in a Czech restaurant on the Rynek, where I had goulash with dumplings.
Day 5 – Friday 14th October 2022 – Wrocław
One of the cultural artefacts that was brought from Lviv to Wrocław after World War II was the Racławice Panorama a massive circular painting depicting the Battle of Racławice of 1794 . In this battle, part of the ultimately unsuccessful Kościuszko Uprising, the Poles defeated the Russian forces. Not surprisingly, after World War II the Russians were not keen on promoting a Polish victory against them and so the Panorama was not displayed for 40 years. It is now housed in its own circular building located in a park on the edge of the city centre. You can only view it with a timed ticket for a half-hour slot with accompanying commentary – headsets are provided for an English translation. Before we left England we had booked a ticket for the first slot of the day at 9.00am. We walked from our hotel to the Panorama building to arrive shortly before our 9.00am booking. We shared our session with a large school group.
From the Panorama we walked to Ostrów Tumski (Cathedral Island), the oldest part of the city, where Wrocław Cathedral is located.
Next stop was the National Museum, which is just an art and sculpture museum, entry to which was included in the Panorama ticket. We wouldn’t have time to see everything, so just concentrated at looking at the 18th and 19th Century European and Polish art on display.
From there we walked a short distance across a park to visit the Post and Telecommunications museum, housed in the main post office headquarters in Wrocław. This was a delightful little museum, where we were the only visitors for much of our time there. Because the constituent parts of Poland have changed several times over the past 200 years, the museum explained the practicalities of having to amalgamate the postal services which used to belong to different countries. There was also an amusing display telling the recent history of the British Royal Family through stamps from around the world.
On leaving the Postal Building we walked round the former defensive moat which surrounded Wrocław city centre to reach the Wrocław City Museum which is housed in the former Royal Palace. This has an extensive collection telling the story of Wrocław (or Breslau as it was for much of the time) over the past 1000 years. It included reconstructions of the rooms stayed in by Frederick the Great when he visited the palace. The museum also described Breslau towards end of World War II. Hitler had ordered it to be a fortress city that should never be surrendered. It was surrounded and besieged by Soviet forces for three months from February to May 1945, finally surrendering only two days before the unconditional surrender of the whole of Germany, by when there was little of the city remaining intact.
The City Museum was so extensive that we spent the rest of the afternoon there. That sadly meant that there was no time left to visit anywhere else that we had considered going to. The Museum of Bourgeois Art is housed in the Old Town Hall in the Rynek and our guidebook suggested that it is worth visiting just to be able to see the interior of the Town Hall, but that would have to wait until another time.
That evening we went to a Georgian restaurant situated underneath the arches of the main railway line out of the city. Being slightly away from the historic centre, it seemed to be largely frequented by locals. I had bean soup followed by pork stew, both of which were exceptionally tasty. The only slight oddity was that the Georgian dumplings that my wife had ordered as a starter were served after her main course.
[To be continued – coming next: Poznań and Warsaw.]
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