🇵🇱 Poland · Lesser Poland and the Tatras (Kraków)
Kraków is, for many, the most beautiful city in Poland and one of the great jewels of central Europe. It was the country's capital for more than 500 years, the city of kings, and — unlike Warsaw or Gdańsk — it had the enormous good fortune to come through the Second World War almost undamaged. That means its medieval centre, its market square (the largest in medieval Europe) and its royal Wawel hill are authentic, with centuries of intact history in every stone. It is no accident that it was one of the first twelve sites in the world inscribed by UNESCO, back in 1978.
But Kraków is not a sleepy museum city: it is young, studenty and vibrant, with the highest number of bars per square metre in the country concentrated in its old town and in the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, today the epicentre of bohemian life and nightlife. Its streets combine the majesty of royal palaces, the moving memory of the Jewish community and the Holocaust (the Podgórze ghetto, Schindler's Factory), the legends of the Wawel dragon and a food and culture scene in full swing.
This guide takes you through the essential Kraków: how to get around, what to see on the Rynek and at Wawel, how to explore Kazimierz and its Jewish memory, which museums are worth it and how to organise the great trips nearby (Wieliczka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Zakopane). A city cheaper than many expect, easy to walk and with a charm that grabs you from your first stroll across its square.
Kraków sits on Wawel hill, inhabited since remote times and tied to the legend of the dragon. It was one of the first seats of the Polish state and, by around the year 1000, was already a bishop's seat. In 1038 it became the capital of the kingdom of Poland, a status it would keep for more than half a millennium. Polish kings were crowned and buried at Wawel. In 1364 its university was founded, one of the oldest in Europe, where Copernicus studied. Although the capital moved to Warsaw around 1596, Kraków remained the spiritual and cultural heart of the country. It came through the Second World War almost intact, but lived the horror of the Holocaust in the Podgórze ghetto and at nearby Auschwitz. Its historic centre and Wawel have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1978. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Historic Poland at its purest: Kraków, the royal capital for centuries, with Wawel, the university of 1364 and the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz; the salt of Wieliczka; the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp; and the mountains of the góral people at Zakopane.
Read the history of Lesser Poland and the Tatras (Kraków) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it had a king, a castle or a cathedral, Kraków had a dragon. The city's best-loved legend tells that in a cave at the foot of Wawel hill lived a fearsome dragon that terrorised the inhabitants and demanded maidens as tribute, until a cunning cobbler named Skuba killed it by tricking it with a lamb stuffed with sulphur. The beast, parched, drank so much water from the Vistula that it burst. On that hill where the dragon lived — today with its fire-breathing sculpture — the heart of Poland would rise.
The historical reality is that Wawel hill was inhabited from prehistoric times, thanks to its strategic position above the river. Around the ninth or tenth century, the region was settled by the Slavic tribe of the Vistulans (Wiślanie). With the formation of the Polish state under the Piast dynasty, Kraków became one of its main centres. Around the year 1000, in the time of King Bolesław I the Brave, it was already the seat of a bishopric, a sign of its importance.
In 1038, King Casimir I the Restorer moved the capital of the kingdom of Poland to Kraków, which from then on would be, for more than five centuries, the royal city par excellence. On Wawel hill the kings' castle and the cathedral were built, the setting for the coronations and burials of the Polish monarchs. The city grew at the foot of Wawel as the capital of an expanding kingdom.
Kraków suffered, like all of central Europe, the devastating Mongol (Tatar) invasion of 1241, which laid the city waste. Its reconstruction was an opportunity: in 1257, under Duke Bolesław V the Chaste, the city received a charter under Magdeburg law, which established its regular street plan around an enormous central market square, the Rynek Główny, the largest medieval square in Europe and still the heart of the city. From that dramatic period also comes the tradition of the hejnał, the trumpet call sounded every hour from St Mary's tower and broken off abruptly in memory of the trumpeter struck — according to legend — by a Tatar arrow.
The great flowering came with King Casimir III the Great (Kazimierz Wielki), who reigned in the fourteenth century. It was said of him that he 'found a Poland of wood and left it of stone'. Casimir fortified and embellished Kraków, founded towns around it — among them Kazimierz, which bears his name and would become the Jewish quarter — and took in Jews expelled from other European kingdoms, laying the foundations of one of the most important Jewish communities on the continent. In 1364 he founded the University of Kraków (today the Jagiellonian University), one of the oldest in Europe, where at the end of the fifteenth century the young Nicolaus Copernicus would study.
Under the Jagiellonian dynasty, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Kraków lived a golden age of culture, politics and art. It was a cosmopolitan, wealthy capital, open to the Italian Renaissance, the heart of a vast Polish-Lithuanian state. Wawel Castle was rebuilt as a magnificent Renaissance palace, and in St Mary's Basilica the monumental altarpiece carved by Veit Stoss (Wit Stwosz) was installed, a high point of European Gothic.
Kraków's political power began to wane at the end of the sixteenth century. With the union of Poland and Lithuania and the state's expansion eastward, the court gradually moved towards the geographical centre of the kingdom. Around 1596, King Sigismund III Vasa effectively moved the capital to Warsaw, which was better placed. Kraków ceased to be the centre of power, although it kept enormous symbolic weight: the kings continued to be crowned and buried in Wawel cathedral, and the city remained the spiritual and cultural heart of Poland.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought war and decline. The Swedish 'Deluge' of the mid-seventeenth century, invasions and epidemics hit the city hard. And then came the national catastrophe: the partitions of Poland (1772, 1793 and 1795), by which Russia, Prussia and Austria divided the country until it was wiped off the map. Kraków came under Austrian rule, within the Galicia region of the Habsburg Empire (with a brief interlude as the 'Free City of Kraków' between 1815 and 1846).
Paradoxically, Austrian rule, culturally more tolerant than the Russian or Prussian, allowed Kraków to become a refuge for the Polish spirit and Polish culture through the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It was a centre of art, literature and the national movement. In this period the old medieval walls were pulled down — except the Barbican and St Florian's Gate — and in their place the green ring of the Planty was created around the old town. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the city lived through the artistic flowering of the 'Young Poland' movement (Młoda Polska).
Kraków regained its place in an independent Poland after the First World War, but the Second World War brought its darkest chapter. In September 1939, Nazi Germany occupied the city and made it the capital of the 'General Government', the administration of the occupied Polish territories, run by Hans Frank from Wawel Castle. Unlike Warsaw, Kraków was not physically destroyed — the Nazis considered it a 'German' city — which is why its medieval centre survives almost intact today. But the human suffering was immense.
Kraków's large and very old Jewish community was persecuted, stripped of its property and confined. In 1941 the Nazis created the Kraków ghetto in the Podgórze district, across the river, where they packed tens of thousands of Jews in appalling conditions. From there, from 1942, they were deported to the extermination camps — above all Bełżec — and to the nearby camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The ghetto was liquidated with extreme brutality in March 1943, and the survivors sent to the Płaszów concentration camp, in the city itself.
Amid that horror came also the story of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who employed more than a thousand Jews in his enamelware factory in Podgórze and managed to save them from death, a story Steven Spielberg immortalised in 'Schindler's List' (1993). Today, Schindler's Factory is a museum about the occupation, the Pharmacy under the Eagle recalls the help given to the Jews of the ghetto, and Ghetto Heroes Square, with its empty chairs, is a moving memorial. The city's Polish intelligentsia was persecuted too: in 1939, in the 'Sonderaktion Krakau', dozens of Jagiellonian University professors were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
After the war, under the communist regime of the Polish People's Republic, the authorities tried to transform the bourgeois, Catholic character of Kraków by building a gigantic industrial workers' district on its edge: Nowa Huta, a socialist 'ideal city' raised in the 1950s around an enormous steelworks, intended to 're-educate' the conservative city. The plan had an unexpected effect: over the years, Nowa Huta became a focus of workers' protest and of Catholic, anti-communist resistance.
Around those years, a priest and later archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, was gaining enormous prestige in the city. In 1978 he was elected pope under the name John Paul II, the first Polish pope and the first non-Italian in centuries. His election electrified Poland and gave decisive impetus to the movement opposing communism. His mass visits to his homeland, and to Kraków in particular, fed the hope of change that would crystallise with the Solidarity trade union and, in 1989, with the end of the communist regime.
That same year, 1978, UNESCO inscribed the Historic Centre of Kraków on the first World Heritage List, one of the first twelve sites on the planet to receive the distinction, along with the nearby Wieliczka salt mines. Since the fall of communism and Poland's entry into the European Union (2004), Kraków has become one of the most visited and dynamic cities in central Europe: a cultural, university and tourist capital, with its medieval centre intact, the living memory of its history and an overflowing youthful energy. Today it is, for many, the essential gateway to Poland.