Poland is a country, culture and language unto its own!   We only saw the smallest sliver of Poland with a week in the city of Krakow then three days in the Southern Podalise region but we loved how different and well, intensely ‘Polish’ it was (see Polish Curiosities section for quirky Polish things).

Krakow is a mesmerising mix of beautiful buildings, ornate churches, royal castles and crumbling soviet era structures. Signs of it’s occupation are evident but so is how well it was preserved while the rest of Poland crumbled in WWII. The buildings in this former capital and second-largest city in Poland (1.6M pop), are a concoction of architectural styles, with Renaissance and Baroque churches lying next to Gothic and Art Nouveau buildings, which belies how the city has evovled over the centuries.

The old town of Krakow is on the UNESCO World Heritage list and rightly so. It has so many different cultural sections, architecturally stunning buildings and of course the castle and the biggest central square in Europe. There’s also endless laneways littered with bars, history, churches and shops plus ornate buildings, provocative sculptures, ancient halls and remnants of Poland under Communism.

Polish Curiosities:

We loved the quirkiness of Polish people and life and have gathered a few of them here:

• Parking is big business – at every tourist town /attraction there are flag wavers that block your path/ dance / do anything to get you in to their parking lot!
• W.C’s are also big business – many people give you access to the toilet in their house or shop for a fee and all public toilets have a person sitting inside collecting a fee!
• There are no stray cats, and very few dogs. We were minding two cats and they were not allowed out of the apartment – ever.
• Very strict on parking in Krakow – there are literally no free parking spots for 10km radius (few residents have cars). They fine you within 5 minutes of parking (we learnt the hard way), and metre parking is 8am-10pm every day. Oh, and they also love to wheel clamp vehicles if you overstay!
• The poles have a massive, sweet tooth with lolly shops stuffed with barrels of sweets and donut and cake shops with sugar loaded treats. They even like to mix raspberry syrup into their beer.
• Forget celebrating just birthdays – they also celebrate name days as all Polish names are associated with a specific date of the year. Double the cakes!
• Higher education is free for Polish citizens. International students pay a very low fee to study in Poland – so it’s a mecca for international students!
• Hard to buy wine by the bottle in a restaurant and when you do it is warm! Had to ask for a glass of ice to cool it down.
• Theres Soviet detritus everywhere – the Jubilat Soviet era department store is the best example – it is exactly as it was built in 1960 just concrete, steel and glass with many 1960s fashions, homewares and memorabilia too.. Its like shopping in a spy-movie film set!
• Families travel with kids of all ages everywhere – on big hikes and trails – always in tow – this may have been exaggerated for us as it was summer holidays.
• There are European wasps everywhere (not just Poland but there seemed more here than other places – maybe it’s all the sugar?)
• Krakow has big wide pedestrian streets that are swept clean early each morning (5am) so there’s a real feeling of pride in the neighbourhoods
• Women 18-35 dress like 5-Year-old girls with pink tutus and bows
• Hot pink -as in full on fluorescent pink – is everywhere on everyone of all ages
• There’s crazy cyclists and scooter riders that weave amongst pedestrians (way too close) – many are deliveroos and they rule!
• Seems like clothing sizes only come in x small – particularly for women over 30
• Polish is one of the world’s most difficult languages. It is not phonetic (Dziękuję (for thank you) is pronounced as Jenn-koo-yah) so hard to even guess how to say anything! They also like to change the endings of words for example, polish surnames that end with -ski/-ska or -cki/-cka change if you are male or female – so if a father’s surname is Kowalski, his daughters surname will be Kowalska.
• Not sure if many Polish people learn to swim as when we visited the local quarry-swimming hole we noticed that they all wore a floatation device (like a big floatie) on a belt to go swimming. We also noted the very high hitched and teeny tiny bather bottoms.

Highlights of Krakow

The city of Krakow packs a lot in and we feel like we only saw half of what’s on offer during our week’s stay. I’ve listed our favourites below but if you dig around other sites you’ll find a lot more.

Wawel Castle

Krakow’s majestic Wawel castle is the centrepiece of the town and can be seen from far down the Vistula river. Wawel Royal Castle was once the political and cultural centre of Poland. Built in the 13th and 14th centuries on the orders of Casimir III the Great, it is still in remarkably good shape, considering that it was sacked numerous times by the Swedes and Prussians. We didn’t buy tickets to go inside but we did walk around the base of the castle where there’s a dragon that breathes fire every 5 minutes much to the delight of the children, and we walked up to the ramparts to the lookout and all around the garden area accessible to the public and past the Renaissance palace, Gothic crown treasury, and, of course, the fantastic Wawel Cathedral with its different coloured domes (the gold one covered in 80 pounds of real gold).  There’s also the massive Planty Park that completely encircles the Old Town and follows where the old medieval city walls used to be and still has ramparts and portes from those times.

Rynek Glówny square:

The Main Market Square (Rynek Glówny in Polish), designed in 1257 is 40,000 square meters and is the biggest Medieval plaza in Europe.  It has witnessed a lot of history – from its glory days as an important market place in the middle ages when silk, spice, textiles and salt were traded in the  central Sukiennice (Cloth Hall) to its role as a meeting ground during the  German occupation, when the square was renamed Adolf Hitler Platz. Today it is a tourist mecca with beautifully adorned horses and carriages waiting to ferry tourists around the old town, umbrella clad cafes plying for trade and amber jewellery is sold from beautiful buildings and historic townhouses, around the rim.

The Krakow Churches

Towering above the main market square, St Mary’s Basilica is hard to miss and is as beautiful on the inside as out. Built out of red-brick in 1347, its two towers, which differ in height, reach over 80 meters. You can pay to climb up the tallest one for marvellous views over the Old Town.

The Sanctuary of Saint Joseph in Krakow-Podgórze is a good example of neo-gothic and neo-renaissance style architecture from the 19th century (pic. 1 above)

There’s also the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, (pic. 2) a Baroque style church built between 1597 and 1619 . Built from creamy dolomite stone it is thought to be the first Baroque building in Poland.

Basilica of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Stanislaus in Krakow (pic. 3) stands out on its own in the outer part of town and has gone from originally being a romanesque church in 1049 then rebuilt as a gothic church in 1472 and finally re-created in the Baroque style in 1750.

Kazimierz district

Kazimierz used to be a separate ‘Royal city’ on an island in the Vistula river until the river was filled in during the 1800s to incorporate it into Krakow itself.  It was an important Jewish-Christian area that became primarily Jewish after a fire ravaged much of the Old Town and the Jewish population moved into Kazimierz. The old, cobbled streets still bear signs of the many synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, as well as monuments and museums. The section behind the archway (pic 2 and 3 above) is where they filmed a lot of Schindler’s List and is well photographed. Its a lively part of town, about 15 minutes from the main square and the streets around Józefa are full of small shops, grungy bars, street stalls selling zapiekanki (Polish pizza) and the market square Plac Nowy has a quirky bazaar, where you can buy anything from antique telephones to communist memorabilia.

Krakow’s confronting Communist and Nazi history

Krakow was occupied by the Germans early in WWII and proclaimed the capital of the General  government – a new territory created and run by Nazi Germany. It became the Third Reich’s supply base for steel and agriculture so the city was well preserved – the Nazis even announced that Kraków was an urdeutsche Stadt (Ancient German City) and they went to great lengths to ‘germanise’ the Krakow people – as well as wipe out the Jewish people.

We also visited two very confronting sites: the Ghetto Heroes square on the site of the old Jewish Ghetto and Schindler’s Factory. We didn’t feel the need to visit Auschwitz concentration camp near Krakow.

Ghetto Heroes Square sits in the district of Podgorze and it used to be called Zgody Square. The area was transformed into the Krakow Ghetto under Nazi rule during WWII and temporarily housed 15-20,000 Jews (from an original population of 70,000) as they awaited deportation to nearby Auschwitz and Plaszow concentration camps and the Belzec killing centre. In 2005 a living monument of 70 larger-than-life chairs was set up on the square to commemorate all the people of Krakow Ghetto whose fate was sealed here (one chair for every 1000 Jews). I found the scale of the chairs really drove home the scale of the massacre and the empty, harsh setting reflected how harrowing this time was.

Schindler’s factory is a former enamel goods factory that was immortalised in Steven Spielberg’s film, ‘Schindler’s List’ and is now a museum about the life of Oscar Schindler and the Nazi occupation of Krakow. Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist who infamously saved over 1,200 Jews’ lives during the Second World War by employing, feeding and often housing them in his factory. The museum does not make a hero out of Schindler as much as the film does and is more of a warts-and-all story of how Schindler was a swindler, womaniser and opportunist who did what he could to help the Jews whilst still profiting. The real focus of the museum is on depicting what life in Krakow was like during WWII for the city’s Jewish citizens – which was very distressing and left us exhausted.

Krakow bars:

Krakow is famous for its bars that range from down and grungy to hip, sleek wine bars and underground nightclubs but the pick of the lot has to be the vodka bars. The Polish word for water is woda and for vodka is wodka so the Polish literally drink vodka like water! We decided to hit the eponymous Wodka Bar and bought a tasting paddle of 6 of their top shelf pure distilled in Krakow best vodkas (there were 4 of us!) and these are our tasking notes (they get more creative the more we drank). Grapefruit – tastes like grapefruit/  grapefruit with vodka / short greyhound / Sally’s greyhound. Ginger – boozy- almost tequila / spicy / alcohol fireball-whiskey. Fig – summer afternoon / butter menthol. Sloe – Benadryl/ throaties  – deliciousness / heat / raspberry syrup. Plum – smooth and sweet / smokey plum jam/ grandma’s house. Elderberry – tangy-tarty yum / fermented garden of Eden / start the lawnmower / lychee summer

The Polish food

Polish food combines the best Slavic, Turkish, German, Hungarian, Jewish and Armenian cuisine. Our top three favourites were the Pierogi Ruskie: Dumplings made of cheese and potato, the Placki Ziemniaczane: potatoe pancakes that started off as peasant food made from low quality potaotes but are now served typically with a tri-salad of grated carrot, beetroot and cabbage and served with chive sour cream – delicious! and Kotlet schabowy z ziemniakami i kapustą: Battered pork filet served with fried cabbage and potatoes. Krakow also has some surprisingly good bakeries – Zacryn on T Koszciuski street just 5 mins walk from our apartment had a queue out the door on weekends for their blueberry pastries and croissants.  And some pretty good coffee shops too with our corner café Winkiel Cafe, serving up seriously good espressos.

We also loved shopping at a little local open-air market in Senatorska street in the suburb called Polwsie Zwierzynieckie just 10 mins walk from our place. We found delicious olives, dips, pestos, tapenades, (see picn-nic pic above) fresh fruit and vegetables and pastries. We kept returning to one lady’s stand as she made us ask for the fruit and vegetables we wanted in Polish and taught us the name of everything. Our other local food experience was at the local pub on the river at the end of our street where you grill your own meat over an open fire then order sides to go with.

Krakow parks, pools and nature:

There’s a lot of big parks, gardens, open spaces, bike paths, mounds and even swimming holes around Krakow. Here are a few we went to:

Kosciusko mound and museum. There are four constructed mounds in Krakow. Mounds date back to prehistoric times when they are believed to have been burial sites and in later centuries, mounds were erected to commemorate important historical figures or events. We were curious about Kosciusko mound as our highest mountain in Australia is Mt. Kosciusko (named as it is perceived to resemble this mound) so we went for a run/walk up to the mound one morning. We learned that Taduez Kosciusko was a Polish and American general in the late 1700s (he was also an architect and created military buildings, mansions and gardens) and a big supporter of peace and brotherhood accepting people of all colour and faith and rejected slavery.  

Zakrzówek Park and Reservoir- Quarry. What a cool find this was – literally! The weather was super-hot when we visited Krakow in mid July and we drove (8km – you could ride or walk or tram there too) to this local ‘swimming hole’ which is an old limestone quarry that filled in when they accidentally pierced through the underwater tablelands. The southern part of the reservoir has five new enclosed swimming pools connected by wide wooden floating docks. Entry is free, but limited to only 600 people max and as it was a super hot Saturday (35c) so we headed for the Northern section which has a free-open area. It is a fair walk to the waterhole and when we got to the swimming steps we were glad we had bought our yoga mat and thongs as it is all hard gravel and stone (there are 4 token wooden lounge chairs). You can get in to the quarry via stone steps, or you can wade in via the gravel – where the dogs swim. The teenagers of course climb the cliffs and leap in from up high. It was curious to see that most adults wore a floating device on a belt around their waist when they went out swimming (perhaps no compulsory swim lessons at school like in Australia?). We had lots of long swims as the water was clear and deliciously cool.

Planty Park – this park has eight separate gardens that make up the park, and they all merge seamlessly to create a circular walking route around the old city

Wieliczka Salt Mine

Ok this is a Mecca tourist attraction – in fact, the Wieliczka salt mine has to be the biggest tourist attraction in the world with 300kms of tunnels to explore!

The salt mine used to be the floor of the ocean – hence why there is so mush salt in the bedrock and you can still see it seeping out of the walls as you walk the corridors. You have to go on a guided tour to access the mine and it lasts 3 hours yet you still only see 2% of the tunnels. We walked down 800 stairs, to 135m underground and along nearly 3 kilometres of winding galleries that took us past re-enactments of the miners at work and the timber pulleys and scaffolds they used, models of the small horses that lived their entire life underground and were super healthy due to the salt air, (there was a small hospital underground for people to rest and breathe the salt air) demonstrations of how they blasted the salt, and incredible sculptures carved into the salt stone by a family of brothers over 70 years. There’s a ballroom where they hold events, grand chandeliers made from salt stone, an art gallery and even a restaurant in the mine.  The salt mine was in operation for 700 years and was transformed into a tourist attraction when they realised they could make millions more from the mine as a tourist attraction than as a mine.

Zakapone and Chocholow

We had heard that Zakapone was not to be missed from a number of people so we booked two nights in the area 1.5 hours south of Krakow on the border of the Tatra Mountains – which are a series of mountains within the Western Carpathians that form a natural border between Slovakia and Poland.

Zakapone is a resort town popular for winter sports and summer hiking. Krupówki Street is the main pedestrian only street that is full of restaurants, hiking and souvenir shops  and good examples of the turn-of-the-20th-century wooden chalets, that symbolise Zakopane-style architecture. We spent an hour or two wandering this main street and the nearby parks and gardens but it was very busy so we headed for our more off the beaten path little town of Chocholow (pronounce it as if you were Santa announcing your arrival “Ho-Ho-Low”). We had a little bedsit in Chocholow opposite the church and next to the only store and were delighted to find our host had left discount vouchers to the nearby Thermal Spa – so we waited for the sun to go down and headed for a soak at 8pm. The spa was also very busy but it was delightful to soak in the tepid mineral waters as the mountains disappeared into he twilight sky.

We had planned to hike to Lake Morskie –  the largest lake in the Tatra Mountains the next day but our host said this would be absolutely packed with tourists and advised us to go to the Chochołowska Valley (Dolina Chochołowska) instead. It was only 10 kms from our place to the turnoff sign and we had been advised not to park in the first (of many carparks) along the 2 km road to the entrance gates. As soon as we turned on to the valley access road, we were assailed by flag waving men who literally stood in front of our car and tried to steer us in to their lot. It was only 8am so we were amongst the first visitors and there was clearly a competition on to snare the early risers. We pulled into the last lot, which cost 20ztl instead of 15 at the first ones but as we had a long hike ahead, we were happy to be closer to the national park gate. Tip: You need cash to pay for parking, the entry fee (8-10 ztl each) and for food/drinks at the refuge or from the trinket/cheese huts along the way.

The trail from the carpark to the refuge is 9 km (3 km on an asphalt road where you can opt to take a ‘petite-train’, then 6km along a flat gravel path that turns very rocky and a little steep as you get closer to the refuge.) It’s a very pretty, fairly easy walk through the valley, alongside a babbling brook and past the iconic triangular-roofed grazing huts. There’s sheep and cows in the fields watched over by the endemic white sheepdogs of the region and huts selling fresh sheep’s cheese. There’s a side track near the refuge that takes you to where John Paul II’s chopper landed on Siwa Polana in june 1983 for him to bless the area too.  The refuge is as far as many people go to enjoy lunch or the famous Chochowlaska desert which is apple pie with blueberry coulis (yes we indulged) but we decided to hike another 5km up to Grzés into the Western Tatras. It’s 1653 above sea level so there’s a fair bit of climbing that becomes more slippery clamouring as you get closer to the summit but boy was it worth it as we could see far across Poland and Slovakia in both directions. Our phone provider kept messaging us to say warning you have activated your phone plan in Poland / warning you have now activated your phone plan in Slovenia/ warning…bit like a ping pong match as we traversed the spine that divided Poland and Slovakia!