KRAKOW, Inside Out
From snowy walks through a fairytale to warming hot
chocolate and cherry vodka, both embrace and escape the cold on a winter’s
break to Poland’s second city.
Escape The Cold, Sugar and Spice and all things nice
With its higgledy-piggledy streets and cobbled alleyways,
Krakow is a city that lends itself to afternoons of contemplation in
tucked-away cafes. Hours can tick by sitting at a window, hands warmed by a cup
of hot chocolate, watching people in thick fur coats and hats wending their way
through the wintry mists of the city.
A walk through Krakow is like following a fairytale trail of
breadcrumbs – around every corner a new place offers something sweet, from
gingerbread biscuits to cranberry fritters to poppy seed cake. ‘In Krakow, we
believe sweet things help to keep out the cold,’ says Arek Liskiewicz, a
university student and a waiter at Pod
aniolami restaurant, where the baked dense apple cake is a sepeciality.
Inside a 13th-century building, the restaurant’s thick, stone walls are the colour of butterscotch. The tweeting of a caged canary punctuates the evening chatter that fills the warm room. I take my slice of famed apple cake, served with a pool od custard, to a spot by a roaring hearth spitting crackling flames. In times gone by the premises were occupied by local goldsmiths, who used the fireplace to melt precious metallic nuggets before thwacking them into the shape on an anvil that now hangs from the cellar ceiling.
The sugar trail takes me next to the Wedel Chocolate Lounge overlooking the city’s grand square – a
place seemingly transplanted from a turn-of-the-century novel. Waitresses in
starched apron make their way around a room filled with cushioned banquettes,
its white walls rising to a vaulted ceiling that cocoons customers from outside
chills. I join them for a treacly glass of hazelnut hot chocolate before making
my way out, passing shelves stuffed with be-ribboned pralines as the
bittersweet aroma of cocoa dust catches in my throat.
Following the maze of back streets to Café Camelot, its
glass panes misted condensation, I realize how Hansel and Gretel must have felt
when they found their gingerbread house. Walking through the door is like
opening the window on an advent calendar: the walls are painted a vivid
raspberry, and wintry draughts are kept at bay by thick red curtains across
stone doorways. At s snug table next to an old-fashioned black iron stove I
drink a Moulin Rouge tea – a mélange of rooibus, strawberry, raspberry,
hibiscus and rosebud, chased by a shot of Wisniowka (cherry vodka): as sweet as
something 40 percent proof can be.
Bask in an eternal summer
Krakow’s white-grey winter gives it the look of a city
cloaked in pigeon feathers, but at the Franciscan Church I find a palette
worthy of a bird of paradise. One of the city’s 120 religious buildings, the 13th-century
church has a stunning art nouveau interior designed by Stanislaw Wyspianski.
When the church was renovated in 1895, the Polish artist covered the walls in a
blaze of colour, painting over-sized water lilies and pansies in purple, green,
yellow and orange. Looking at the vivid panels, I am transported to a
sun-drenched picnic on the edges of a blue bell wood. Bright, winter light is
filtered through an extraordinary stained glass window, which depicts the
bearded figure of God surrounded by vibrant flames of turquoise and inky blue.
Wyspianki’s imaginative designs also decorate the windows of
Krakow’s historic St Mary’s Basilica, the imposing
Gothic church adjacent to the main market square. Inside, the vaulted ceiling
rises above me like a giant Faberge egg, its cerulean blue panels interior
overlaid by hundreds of golden stars. The church’s interior is a gloriously
assembled patchwork of styles: blazing pink and red stone panels dotted with
gilt-cloaked religious figurines and an imposing organ, heavy with pewter-grey
pipes.
Music to warm the soul
It’s midnight as I walk down Krakow’s main street, the
Florianska. Like everyone else I am wrapped up against the night’s chill, but
still the cold penetrates. By the time I reach Piec Art, my eyelids feel laced with ice. The faint strains of saxophone bubbling up through the
ground tell me I am in the right place and I walk down a narrow flight of
stairs to emerge in a red bricked cellar. A group of men in jeans and biker boots are huddled around a table with
tumblers of vodka in hand, listening intently to the music.
The jazz played by the three-piece band is soft and
seductive, threading through the shadows like a curlicue of cigarette smoke.
Sometimes, the barman tells me, this place gets wild and full of people who
dance into the early hours, but this evening, the jazz is reflective, lapping
like a tide at the edges of the night. I take a candlelit table in the corner
and watch as the room fills, chattering voices accompanying the instruments
like a percussion.
The next day, in need of the strong black coffee so beloved
by jazz fans, I head for Alchemia –
this club, café and bar in the Kazimierz district has a basement stage that
attracts some of the genre’s biggest names. In the morning, there’s an offbeat,
arty clientele: men in black polo necks discussing philosophical issues. The
tables are covered with lace, and a stuffed bird haughtily observes customers
from behind the till. The air seems heavy with the imprints of long-ago Krakow
residents who still stalk the rooms. ‘There are no ghost here,’ says the
manager Brunon Bierzenink, not entirely convincingly. ‘Alcemia is haunted only
by music.’
The historic inhabitants of the Benedictine Abbey in Tyniec,
which rises steeply from a riverbank on the southwestern outskirts of Krakow,
never really left. Black-cowled monks have walked the courtyard of the working monastery since
1044, their footballs crunching in the snow over nearly a millennium of
winters. The quiet mane may seem unlikely champions for the power of music, but
the Abbey’s Gothic church is a popular
venue for organ recitals and concerts, and every day at seven o’clock the
brothers sing vespers (evening prayer) in Latin. Their somber voices weave
together into an eerie melody, which drifts and echoes around the abbey’s
ancient walls.
EMBRACE THE COLD
Sample the salt of
the earth
There are no elevators going down into the Wieliczka Sait Mine, no soothing
mechanized whir to ease my journey into its cavernous depths. Instead, I walk
down several hundred wooden steps that twist and turn in wards like an Escher
print, burrowing 135m into the coolness of the earth. Inside lies an eerie subterranean
world of labyrinthine passages, lakes and caverns. Although the temperature is
kept at a constant 14-16`C, the draughts that whistle through the shafts, and
the lack of natural light, make it feel much cooler.
The salt mine has been producing salt for more than 700
years, and dates back to an era when salt was as valuable a commodity as oil is
today. Through the centuries, the salt miners have carved out chapels and
religious statuettes as they work, many of which survive intact as an extraordinary
testament to their ingenuity. The Chapel of The Blessed Kinga is a vast,
echoing space lined with detailed carvings in the salt walls, including a
reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s The
last Supper. Intricate chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Lighting up the
gloom with crystals made from glittering shards of translucent rock salt.
A legacy of loss
A lonesome rabbi in a long balck coat walks along
kazimierz’s quiet streets bordered by brick walls paled pink by age. Founded in
1335 as an independent town, Kazimierz became home to Krakow’s Jews after their
expulsion from the main city in 1494. Today, it’s imbued with an odd silence: a
legalcy of the extermintation of the city’s Jewish population under the Nazis.
Before the war 60,000 Jews lived here; now, there are barely 200.
The 16th-century Remuh Syangogue is the only
active synagogue left in Krakow and its cemetery contains row upon row of
tombstones inscribed in Hebrew, carefully restored after Nazi damage. Adam
Libon, the synagogue’s caretaker, tells me about his father, a 16-year-old Jew
at the start of World War II – he was taken to three concentration camps before
being rescued by factory owner Oskar Schindler, who took Jan to work in his
Krakow enamelware factory. Jan survived, dying four years ago, aged 84. ‘It is
very sad that so many people had to leave-here,’ says Adam.
Pockets of traditional culture survive: across from the
synagogue is Klezmer-Hols, a Jewish restaurant with lace tablecloths and sepia
photographs of men with ringlets, who gaze down at us through the years.
One upon Wawel Hill
Walking up the gentle snow covered slope towards The Royal
Castle, my breath a wisp of steam in the cold air, I am enveloped by the
dream-like notion that I have been transplanted into a story by the Grimm
Brothers. I almost expect to see a distressed maiden unwinding her long hair
from one of the windows of the Gothic-era castle, with its onion-shaped domes
and ochre-tiled roofs pressed against the winter sky.
Set at the southernmost tip of the Old Town, a limestone
outcrop rising out of the cobbled streets and surrounded by the glistening waters of the Vistula river, it’s
easy to imagine fairytale royalty and mystical creatures in the grounds of Wawel Hill. The castle has been the
residence of Polish Kings and queens for five centuries, and there’s even a
Dragon’s Den – the damp cave beneath a line of turret fortifications is said to
have housed a fire breathing beast that terrorized local residents in the city’s
early days. The ruler, Prince Krak, offered his daughter’s hand in marriage to
whoever could kill the dragon. Many died trying before a young cobbler struck
upon a scheme to stuff a sheep with sulphur and leave it outside the animal’s
lair. When the dragon ate it, he became unbearably thirsty and went to the
river to drink – and the water caused
his stomach to swell until it exploded. The dragon died. And the cobbler? He
and his princess lived happily ever after.
Poland’s royal capital for 500 years, Krakow is a treasure
trove of Gothic and Renaissance architecture. But this is no museum city – use
our guide to find what’s hidden along its snowy streets, from a communist-era
poster gallery to a cosy cake and coffee shop.
Getting There.
With Lufthansa (Lufthansa.com), fly into Frankfurt before connecting to
Krakow’s John Paul II International Airport.
Getting Around.
Krakow’s one-way system baffles even native Poles, so car hire is inadvisable.
The centre is small enough to walk around, but there’s also an efficient
network of buses and trams. Buy tickets (all US$0.80) from the kiosks dotted
around town.
Further reading.
Lonely Planet’s Krakow Encounter (US$12.99) is perfect for short breaks. David
Lodge’s novel Deaf Sentence has a
poignant description of a visit to Auschwitz.
3 Ways to Do it.
Budget. There’s
plenty of old world glamour to be found at HOTEL
SASKI, which occoupies a grand old mansion just of rynek Glowny (from
US$100; hotelsaski.com.pl).
Except for St Mary’s
Basilica and Wawel Cahtedral, Krakow’s historic churches can all be visited
for free. The catacombs of St Casimir’s Church contain 1,000 mummifed bodies
dating back to 1667 (ul reformacka 4).
With Jewish dishes such as czulent (bean casserole with beef
and vegetables). DAWNO TEMU NA
KAZIMIERZU is a blast from the past, with sewing machines on the tables and
old shop signs (mains from Us$6; ul Sxeroka 17).
Browse for bargains
at PLAC NOWY’s Saturday
morning street market. For a restorative lunch try a zapienkanka, a Polish open
sandwich (US$2.50).
Midrange.
Situated just inside the city walls opposite St Florian’s Gate, HOTEL POLSKI offers comfortable,
ecelectically furnished rooms. There’s small café on the ground floor and staff
are helpful (from US$120, podoreim.com.pl).
Visit the historic CLOTH
HALL at Rynek Glowny, also home to The Gallery of 19th century
Polish Art (Rynek Glowny 1).
Atmospheric MIOD
MALNA is a Krakow institution. Located in a 14th-century
building, the décor is rustic and charming and there’s a wood-burning stove. Try
the bold and tangy borscht – beetroot soup (mains from Us$6; miodmalina.pl).
Visit CUKIERNIA
CICHOWSKI for cakes and chocs so pretty you’ll be reluctant to scoff them
(ul Starowisha 21).
LUXURY. Elegant HOTEL
STARY is a renovated, 15th-century merchant’s house, including
three luxury suites featuring original frescoes. Try the restaurant’s winter
menu, featuring local forest fruits (from US$260; hotelstary.com).
Explore in one of the many HORSE-DRAWN CARRIAGES, which line up at the northern end of Rynek
Glowny and on ul Grodzka (US$58 per half hour).
Named after a medieval merchant who hosted a grand feast for
royals in 1364, WIERZYNEK RESTAURANT
exudes historic opulence, but offers a modern Polish menu (mains from US$19’
wierzynek.com.pl).
Pick up communist-era souvenirs at GALERIA PLAKATU, where
you’ll find the very best of Polish poster art (from US$6’ galeriaplakatu.com).
Rynek Glowny, the main market square in Krakow's Old Town, is Europe's largest medieval square
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
Elizabeth Day on a visit to the former Nazi concentration
camp near Krakow, now the site of a sobering museum.
Any attempt to convey what it feels like to stand on this
barren patch of land 25 miles west of Krakow seems desperately inadequate. Once
a concentration camp, now a memorial and state museum, Auschwitz-Birkenau is
where the Nazis murdered 1.1 million Jews. I arrive at 8am and for an hour I am
alone, but two hours later I see a discomfiting gaggle of tourist pose for
photos beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Brings Freedom) gateway.
For a place where such destruction was wrought, Auschwitz is
small. Originally established as a camp for Polish political prisoners in 1940,
it was later designated for the
extermination of Jews and a much larger facility was built in nearby Birkenau.
In block 4 at Auschwitz, museum exhibits include a huge
glass display case filled with hair cut fro mthe heads of some 140,000 victims.
The gas chamber feels dank, unpleasantly claustrophobic: a single, guttering
candle flame provides the only hint of warmth in a whistling wind.
At Birkenau , it’s the size and complexity of the Nazi
operation that hits me: the notorious Auschwitz railway line, surrounded by
acre upon bleak acre of flimsy barrack rooms where thousands met their deaths.
I walk for hours over the pockmarked soil, towards the
remnants of several vast gas chambers, dynamited by the Nazis before Allied troops
liberated the camp. The concrete has collapsed in on itself now, and all that
remains is a rubble-strewn emptiness surrounded by inhospitable vastness. That such
an inhuman place could have been built by humans is the most difficult and
devastating truth of all.
Getting there. Frequent buses (US$2.60; 90 mins) travel to
Oswiecim, dropping passengers in the museum car park. There are also hourly
trains (US$3.80; 90mins) to Oswiecim, from where you can catch a local bus of
taxi. Alternatively, most Krakow hotels will be able to arrange a personal taxi
service to and from Auschwitz and Birkenau for around Us$100-Us$135. Entry to
both sites is by donation. Find out more at en.auschwitz.org.pl/m
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