It was already raining when we left the flat, and Julie was annoyed that BBC Weather had lied to us AGAIN! Having got the lie of the land, we walked up Grodzka to the Market Square, the heart of the old city of Krakow. The Market Square (Rynke Glowny) is 200 metres square and was laid out in 1257 when Duke Boleslaw the Chaste (not a Monty Python name) gave Krakow its charter. It’s the biggest square in Europe, and is surrounded by beautiful historic buildings. I have seen a few ancient squares in Brugge, Bristol, Prague and Seville, and this is the best.
Sitting in the middle is the Cloth Hall, which looks like a Renaissance building, but is actually 19th century. The arcade down the middle is lined with souvenir shops selling wooden toys, hats and fridge magnets. I got a charming fridge magnet for 15 Zlotys, probably too much. But the best is hidden beneath. A decade ago the square was excavated and all sorts of amazing archeology was exposed. When the archaeologists has finished, a huge concrete slab was laid over it and the dig became Rynek Underground Museum.
It is a very high tech museum, with lots of touch screens and low lighting, so low that the written signs were hard to read. Layers of old streets and foundations are shown, and a whole row of medieval shops which were used by all the local traders and craftsmen. We spent several hours in there, it is a very different and fascinating museum.
Emerging back into the square we walked a short way over the the Church of St Mary, which is a huge Gothic building with two towers at the front. Inside there is barely a square inch that is not decorated in some way. The highlight is the elaborately carved high alter, painted wooden statues and lots of gold leaf. We paid 10 zlotys to get in, but if we had been good Catholics we could have got on a different entrance to pray for nothing!
All that culture left us very hungry, so we went to a tourist trap and ate some poor food. I had Bigos, which is supposed to be a stew, but it was cabbage with a few bits of meat and lots of bread. It filled a gap but wasn’t great food.
The castle and cathedral are on Wawel Hill at the edge of the old town overlooking the Vistula, which was a trading route to The North Sea. There wasn’t enough time to go inside any of the buildings, so we had a look around the courtyard and enjoyed the views over the city.
By then we had seen enough old buildings and paintings and it was cold and raining. Time to go and get a coffee and cake, something that Poland is very good at.
And finally, I found Fred Flintstone’s bike parked in the street.
timharnesstravels 