Lesser Poland Voivodeship (Małopolskie)
Kraków is the Polish city that survived. Read more
Five hundred years of Polish kingship in one Renaissance courtyard, with the Jagiellonian tapestries and the Ottoman tents from the relief of Vienna — and the hill itself, free to walk, with the best view of the river in the city.
The single best-preserved medieval urban space in Central Europe, and the room the whole city is arranged around — plus a trumpet call from a church tower every hour that the whole square still looks up for.
The largest Gothic altarpiece in the world, carved over twelve years, with faces modelled on real fifteenth-century Cracovians — and the tower the city's hourly trumpet call comes from.
Where Polish kings were crowned and are buried, plus the finest Renaissance chapel north of the Alps and a 1520 bell that only rings when something happens to the country.
The grave of Moses Isserles, one of the most important rabbis in European history, in a working synagogue and a sixteenth-century cemetery whose destroyed headstones were rebuilt into a single wall of fragments.
Seventy empty bronze chairs standing in the square where the ghetto's deportations were assembled — the most quietly devastating memorial in Kraków, and one you walk straight into rather than approach.
One of the great modernist churches in Europe, built by volunteer labour over a decade of confrontation with the state, in a town designed to have no churches at all.
The centre of a socialist ideal city — five avenues radiating from one arcaded square, laid out with Renaissance geometry and Stalinist detailing, and unfinished on purpose by history rather than design.
A monument to a national hero built by hand, one basket of earth at a time, by people from a country that had ceased to exist — with the classic panorama of Kraków from the top.
Wyspiański's 'God the Father — Arise' window, the boldest piece of Art Nouveau glass in Poland, in a free and usually empty thirteenth-century church five minutes from the square.
You stand on the actual medieval market square, four metres under the modern one — the best-presented archaeological site in Poland, and the thing most visitors walk over without knowing it exists.
One of the world's small handful of Leonardo paintings, in a museum founded in 1796 specifically to keep Polish memory alive after the country was erased from the map.
The oldest surviving synagogue in Poland, a Renaissance twin-nave hall from the 1570s, and the single best introduction to what the community that built it actually was.
Twelve years of photographs of what is left of Jewish Galicia — no archive images, only landscapes as they are now — and the museum in Kraków most likely to change how you look at the rest of the city.
The one place inside the Kraków ghetto run by someone who chose to be there — reconstructed as the working pharmacy it was, with the testimony hidden in its own drawers.
The definitive account of Kraków under German occupation, in the building where Schindler ran the factory — immersive, unflinching, and much bigger in scope than the film that made it famous.
The room Copernicus studied in, a Gothic courtyard free to walk into, and one of the earliest globes in the world to put America on it.
Seven hundred years of continuous trading under one roof, free to walk through — and a first-floor gallery of nineteenth-century Polish painting that most people on the square never realise is there.
The best zapiekanka in Poland from a hatch in a 1900 kosher poultry slaughterhouse, in the square that is Kazimierz's market by day and its nightlife by night.
Six hundred and fifty years of continuous trading, five minutes from the Barbican, selling the food Cracovians actually cook with rather than the food visitors are sold.
Turquoise water in a thirty-metre limestone quarry, with lifeguarded floating pools and cliffs above them, three kilometres from the Main Square.
The city's best evening walk — flat, continuous riverside promenades with barge bars moored along them and Wawel lit above the water.
The city walls became a park — four kilometres of it, unbroken, wrapping the whole Old Town, and the only way to cross the centre without meeting the crowd.
The cheapest honest lunch in the Old Town, in an institution that has been feeding Cracovians the same food the same way since the communist era.
The zapiekanka that Cracovians actually queue for, from a hatch in the old kosher slaughterhouse, at 1am, for the price of a coffee.
The milk bar model in the town it was designed for — state-subsidised, unreconstructed, full of locals, and cheaper than a coffee on the Main Square.
Proper Polish home cooking — gołąbki, placki, chłodnik in summer — at prices from a different neighbourhood, five minutes from Plac Nowy.
The real thing: a milk bar with no concessions to anybody, serving a full Polish lunch for the price of a coffee on the Rynek.
A charcoal grill in the back of a Communist-era van, selling one thing, from 8pm to 3am — the most Kraków meal there is.
