Krakow throws off historic shackles
With a sprawling royal castle and an old town to rival the finest in Europe, Krakow is historic Poland. But, as George Driver discovers, there’s more to the city than old buildings.
Poland. For me, the name evoked images of concrete apartment blocks, harsh winters, and black-and-white images of bombed towns and concentration camps. The cities – Wroclaw, Krakow, Warsaw – sounded more like the lairs of villains in a fairy tale than places to visit on holiday.
So I expected to find a bleak and rundown country still recovering from its turbulent past.
But that notion was dispelled as soon as I stepped off the train at Krakow. The enormous modern station led on to a plush mall that was so large it took 10 minutes to find my way out. The comfortable and modern train was one of the best I’d been on in Europe.
Outside, I was hit by a blast of summer heat, and I saw a large beach volleyball court taking up an entire square. This was not the austere Eastern European backwater I had imagined.
The 20th century wasn’t kind to Poland. About a fifth of the population (six million people) were killed in World War II, the highest proportion of any country in Europe, and nearly double the rate of Germany.
Much of the country was levelled. This was followed by 45 years as a satellite state of the Soviet Union. But recently Poland’s fortunes have been on the rise. The country has one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, and more tourists are exploring its picturesque cities and hiking in its 23 national parks.
Krakow’s old town is one of the country’s top attractions, and for good reason. It has been a hub of central Europe for 1000 years. Its medieval buildings, churches and monasteries have been immaculately restored, and the old quarter (a Unesco World Heritage site), can be comfortably explored in a day or two.
From the train station, I walked through a leafy park towards the town centre. This was originally the city’s moat, part of fortifications built after Krakow was sacked by the Mongols in 1241. The moat was filled in 200 years ago, creating a four kilometre ring of parkland around the old town.
Some of the medieval defences, however, still remain. I came to a 500-year-old circular brick fort dubbed the Barbican and regarded as one of the best preserved of its kind. It stands next to a 700-year-old, 34-metre-high tower, rising from the last remnants of the city walls. An archway beneath it forms the historic city gates. It all provides a remarkable fairy tale entrance to the old quarter, called Stare Miasto.
The city gates mark the start of the Royal Road, a kind of ‘‘greatest hits’’ tour through medieval Krakow, running through the iconic market square to Wawel Castle, the former royal residence on the other side of town.
The historic buildings were indeed incredible, but after a couple of hours of sightseeing in the heat at the crowded attractions, I was beginning to fade. Like many of Europe’s old quarters, the area also had the hallmarks of a tourist trap.
The shops almost exclusively sold stuff to travellers and the restaurants and bars were mostly the kind of generic places – beer terraces out front under branded umbrellas – found throughout the continent. It felt insulated from the Polish culture I had come to experience.
The next morning, I boarded a modern and airconditioned tram to Nowa Huta, 12km out of town.
I was hoping to catch a glimpse of what life was like behind the Iron Curtain and in its enduring shadow. Nowa Huta was one of the first planned Soviet cities, billed as a communist utopia.
Built in the early 1950s, it eventually housed 200,000 people based around the new creatively-named Vladimir Lenin Steelworks, which employed 40,000 people.
It was part of Stalin’s charm offensive to win the country over to communism after the war. Every apartment was identical, designed to accommodate the same state-made furniture and appliances. But it was also an affordable way to give thousands of people a standard of living unknown before in many parts of Poland.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the steel mill has shrunk significantly (it is now owned by a multinational company and has just 3500 workers), and for a time the city became known for crime
and mass unemployment. But the area is growing again.
I was expecting to find an austere and rundown Soviet dystopia, but it seemed similar to state housing developments in New Zealand, just on a much larger scale. In fact, it was better – the rows of concrete apartment blocks were interspersed with parks and broad tree-lined streets. It had cycleways and a regular tram service.
The homogenous buildings also housed some hidden gems. Walking the streets, I came to a World War II-era tank parked on the corner of what looked like another apartment block. In fact, it was the Museum of the Military Achievement. Inside, a large moustached man shook my hand and told me to follow him. He led me past displays of military memorabilia and opened a glass case, removing a small submachine gun, which he thrust into my hands.
‘‘This was the gun of the Polish resistance,’’ he said of what I later discovered was a Sten gun.
I awkwardly inspected the weapon and when I curiously lifted it to my shoulder he shouted, ‘‘whoa, whoa, whoa’’, and grabbed the gun from me and ejected the magazine to check if it was loaded.
‘‘You never know,’’ he said. At this point, I realised the man was quite drunk. He said he moved to Nowa Huta in 1956 when he was 6, and later fled Poland and joined the United States military. ‘‘My job was to hunt down communists,’’ he said.
But he was so erratic, it was hard to distinguish fact from fiction and, after posing for a photo, he became tired of my questions and stumbled off before I could learn more.
Around the corner was a market with stalls selling everything from sauerkraut and sausages to underwear and plumbing fittings. It was only a 20-minute tram ride from central Krakow and the opulent mall of the city, but it felt like the edge of civilisation.
Before heading back to Krakow, I visited the Museum of Nowa Huta, which details the history of the planned city. But the highlight was the building’s nuclear shelter.
Initially, all of the apartments were built with a bomb shelter in the basement. Walking through the damp, cell-like rooms decorated with gas maskwearing mannequins gave a terrifying glimpse into the fear of the Cold War, as the world edged towards an apocalyptic nuclear conflict.
Back in Krakow, I visited the trendy Kazimierz neighbourhood, just beyond the walls of the old town. It was filled with bars and restaurants oozing rustic chic, and crowded with people lounging in beer gardens and queuing at food stalls.
Originally, this was a centre of Jewish culture. Poland was long renowned for religious tolerance, and the city had a Jewish community of 68,000, most of whom lived in Kazimierz.
But when Krakow was occupied by the Germans in 1939, the population was rounded up and crammed into a ghetto across the Vistula river. About 1000 people ended up working in Oskar Schindler’s factory nearby (the subject of the movie Schindler’s List), but many more ended up in Nazi death camps. Auschwitz is 66km away.
Today, there are almost no Jews left in Kazimierz. Dwelling on the grizzly fate of the neighbourhood’s former residents, I lost my thirst for craft beer and left.
That evening I walked beside the Vistula as the sun set, lighting up Wawel Castle opposite. Hundreds of Krakowians sat in deck chairs at a bar outside an abandoned Soviet-era luxury hotel, while more lay splayed out on the grass bank by the river.
Later, the main square came to life in the darkness, people rejoicing in the mild temperatures after another sweltering day. The historic buildings were spectacularly lit, and there was a queue of horse carriages waiting to take punters for a ride. From the tower of the impressive St Mary’s Basilica, a trumpeter played a haunting song, a five-note sequence that is said to have been played from the tower every hour for hundreds of years.
A timeless moment in this ever-changing city.