5 Days in Kraków

Start in the middle of Rynek Główny, the Main Market Square, one of the largest medieval town squares in Europe. It was laid out in 1257, when Kraków was rebuilt after the Mongol raids, and the street plan around it has barely changed since. Locals meet pod Adasiem, "under Adam", which is the statue of the poet Adam Mickiewicz. Skip the horse-drawn carriages lined up by the Cloth Hall: they're expensive, and many people in Kraków would like to see them gone.

The long building in the middle is the Cloth Hall (Sukiennice), where merchants once sold cloth and salt. It burned in 1555 and was rebuilt in the Renaissance style, and it still sells things: amber, lace, wooden toys and a lot of souvenirs. Upstairs is a gallery of 19th-century Polish painting with a café terrace over the square. Next to it, the Town Hall Tower is all that's left of a town hall pulled down in 1820, and you can climb it for the view.

Under your feet is the Rynek Underground, a museum built into the excavations beneath the square: medieval streets, market stalls and graves, shown with a lot of screens and holograms. It's good, and it's popular, so book a time slot.

The brick church with two unequal towers on the corner of the square is St. Mary's Basilica. Every hour, a trumpeter plays the hejnał from the taller one, four times, once in each direction, and stops each time in the middle of a note. The story you'll hear is that a trumpeter was shot through the throat by a Tatar arrow while sounding the alarm in 1241. It's a good story, and the version everyone tells was popularized by an American children's novel from 1928, The Trumpeter of Krakow. The call itself is centuries older, and Polish Radio has broadcast the noon one live since 1927.

Inside is the reason to come: the altarpiece carved in limewood by Veit Stoss (Wit Stwosz) between 1477 and 1489, often called the largest Gothic altarpiece in the world, with figures of the apostles, larger than life, around the dying Virgin. Its wings are opened at 11:50 from Monday to Saturday, so be there a few minutes early. The rest of the church, a deep blue ceiling covered in gold stars, is just as good.

For lunch, walk down Grodzka street to a bar mleczny, a milk bar. They started as cheap canteens serving mostly dairy dishes, and under communism they were subsidized so that workers could eat a hot meal for almost nothing. A few survived, still with a counter, a handwritten menu and trays, and they're the best way to try home-style Polish food for a few euros.

Order pierogi (dumplings) and a soup, żurek or barszcz, point if you need to, and wait for your number to be called. Pod Temidą, at Grodzka 43, is the real thing. Milkbar Tomasza, on św. Tomasza street on the other side of the square, is a newer, café-style take on the idea, closed on Mondays. Milk bars close early, around 7 or 8pm, and some keep shorter hours at weekends.

The Czartoryski Museum holds one of only four portraits of women that Leonardo da Vinci painted: Lady with an Ermine, from around 1490, of Cecilia Gallerani, the teenage mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan. The collection was started by Princess Izabela Czartoryska in 1801 as Poland's first museum, when Poland had just disappeared from the map, and the painting has survived being hidden, looted by the Germans and hung in the Wawel office of Hans Frank, the German governor of occupied Poland, before it came back in 1946.

It's in its own dark room, and you can stand in front of it for as long as you like, which is not something you can say about the Mona Lisa. The rest of the museum is worth an hour too, with a Rembrandt landscape and a lot of Polish history.

Two minutes away is what's left of the city walls. Florian Gate, from the early 14th century, was the main entrance to the city, and every king's coronation procession came through it on the Royal Route, down Floriańska street, across the square and along Grodzka to Wawel. In front of it stands the Barbican, a round brick fortress from 1498 with seven turrets, one of the few of its kind left in Europe.

The rest of the walls came down in the early 1800s, and the moat was turned into the Planty, a four-kilometer ring of park around the Old Town. Walk a stretch of it, then cut back through the streets to see the courtyard of Collegium Maius, the oldest building of the Jagiellonian University, the university where Copernicus studied in the 1490s. In November 1939 the Germans called its professors to a lecture and arrested 183 of them, part of their plan to destroy Poland's educated class.

Kraków's nightlife lives underground. Under the old houses around the square are hundreds of brick-vaulted cellars, and many of them are bars and clubs. The most famous is Piwnica pod Baranami, "the cellar under the rams", in the palace of that name on the square. It opened in 1956, 70 years ago this year, as a cabaret and became one of the few places in communist Poland where people could laugh at the system and get away with it, and it still has cabaret and concerts.

For jazz, Harris Piano Jazz Bar next door and U Muniaka on Floriańska have live music most nights. Before or after, have dinner anywhere off the square, not on it.

Wawel Cathedral is Poland's Westminster Abbey. Its kings were crowned here from 1320 to 1734, and most of them are buried here too, along with the people Poland decided belonged with them: the national poets Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, the independence hero Tadeusz Kościuszko and Marshal Józef Piłsudski. The most recent are President Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria, who died in the Smoleńsk plane crash in 2010, and whose burial here was fiercely argued over at the time.

Look for the Sigismund Chapel on the south side, with the gold dome, one of the finest Renaissance buildings north of the Alps. Then climb the narrow wooden stairs of the Sigismund Tower to the Sigismund Bell, cast in 1520 and rung only on the biggest national and church occasions. Touch its heart, the clapper, for luck. Before you leave, look at the bones hanging by the main door. They're the bones of a mammoth, a woolly rhino and a whale, but tradition calls them the dragon's, and says the world will end when they fall.

Next door is the Royal Castle, rebuilt as a Renaissance palace by Sigismund the Old in the early 1500s. Its arcaded courtyard is the part everyone photographs, and it's free to walk into. When the court moved to Warsaw around 1600 the kings left, fires and Swedish and Prussian looting followed, and after 1795 the Austrians turned the castle into a barracks for about a century. The rooms you see today were restored in the 20th century. During World War II Wawel was the residence of Hans Frank, who ran occupied Poland from Kraków as the capital of the German General Government.

The exhibitions are sold separately, with timed tickets. The one to choose is the Castle Second Floor: the State Rooms, with the huge Flemish tapestries that Sigismund Augustus ordered in the 1550s, which spent World War II in Canada and came home only in 1961. Add the Crown Treasury, a separate ticket, if you want to see Szczerbiec, the coronation sword.

Every child in Poland knows the story. A dragon lived in a cave under Wawel, eating cattle and sheep, until someone tricked it into swallowing a carcass stuffed with burning sulphur. The first written version, from around 1200, already has the sulphur; the clever shoemaker Skuba, and the dragon drinking so much of the Vistula to cool its stomach that it burst, were added in the 16th century. Either way, Kraków has fully adopted it.

From the castle grounds, a spiral staircase of 135 steps takes you down into the Dragon's Den, a real limestone cave, and out onto the riverbank next to a bronze dragon by Bronisław Chromy from 1972 that breathes fire every few minutes. Then walk the Vistula boulevards east toward Kazimierz and stop for lunch on the way. Just before Kazimierz, the Pauline church of Skałka stands where Bishop Stanislaus was killed in 1079, and its crypt holds the tombs of Polish writers and artists, Wyspiański and Czesław Miłosz among them.

Kazimierz was founded by King Casimir the Great in 1335 as a separate town next to Kraków. At the end of the 15th century the Jews of Kraków were moved here, and for the next 450 years it was one of the great centers of Jewish life in Europe. Before World War II about a quarter of Kraków's population was Jewish. Almost all of them were murdered.

Szeroka, a wide street that's more a square, was the heart of it. At one end is the Old Synagogue, the oldest surviving synagogue in Poland, now a museum of Jewish life. At the other is the small Remuh Synagogue, still used for prayer, with an old cemetery behind it whose broken gravestones were pieced together into a wall after the war. A few streets away are the grand 19th-century Tempel Synagogue and the Isaac Synagogue, reopened in 2026 after restoration. The Galicia Jewish Museum nearby tells what happened to the Jewish towns of southern Poland, and the New Jewish Cemetery on Miodowa is quieter and more moving than the crowds on Szeroka. Kazimierz was run down and half empty for decades after the war; Spielberg filming Schindler's List here in 1993 and the Jewish Culture Festival, held every summer since 1988, helped bring it back.

Plac Nowy is Kazimierz's market square: a flea market and food stalls by day, and the center of its nightlife after dark. In the middle is the Okrąglak, a round brick hall from 1900 that from the late 1920s served as the Jewish community's poultry slaughterhouse, and today its windows sell zapiekanki.

A zapiekanka is half a baguette topped with mushrooms and melted cheese, then ketchup and whatever else you want, and it's a communist-era street food that never went away. It's cheap, huge and exactly right at 11pm. Endzior is the famous window, cash only, and there's a queue for a reason.

The streets around Plac Nowy are the best place in Kraków for a night out. Alchemia on Estery street is the classic: candles, mismatched furniture, a cellar with concerts, and the feeling that nothing has been redecorated since the 1990s, on purpose. There are dozens more like it, from tiny vodka bars to courtyards full of craft beer.

For something quieter, go to a klezmer concert, the Jewish folk music of Central Europe, with clarinet, violin and accordion. The best are in the synagogues and at the Jewish Culture Festival; many locals find the "Jewish-style" restaurants with dinner-and-klezmer shows on Szeroka a bit of a costume. Kraków also has a small, living Jewish community again, centered on the JCC next to the Tempel Synagogue.

In March 1941 the Germans forced the Jews of Kraków into a few streets of Podgórze, walled off with a wall shaped like a row of Jewish gravestones. In March 1943 the ghetto was cleared: people were sent to the Płaszów camp nearby or to Auschwitz, and between one and two thousand were shot in the streets and houses. Ghetto Heroes Square was where they were gathered. Today it's filled with 70 empty bronze chairs, 33 large and 37 small, a memorial from 2005 inspired by the furniture left lying on the square after the deportations.

On one corner is the Pharmacy Under the Eagle. Its owner, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, was the only Pole who lived inside the ghetto, and he and his staff used the shop to pass food, medicine, news and false papers. It's now a small museum. A short walk away on Lwowska street is one of the remaining pieces of the ghetto wall.

Oskar Schindler was a German businessman and Nazi party member who took over an enamel factory here in 1939 and, by employing Jewish workers, saved about 1,200 of them from the camps. The building is now a branch of the city museum, and its exhibition isn't really about him. It's about Kraków under German occupation from 1939 to 1945, told room by room with photographs, sounds and reconstructions, and it's one of the best museums on the war anywhere.

Allow two hours and don't rush it. Schindler's office, with a glass memorial built from the factory's enamel pots, is part of the route. Next door, in another part of the factory, is MOCAK, the museum of contemporary art, if you have the energy. The camp at Płaszów, run by the SS officer Amon Göth, where many of the ghetto's survivors and Schindler's workers were held, is 20-30 minutes' walk south; the site is an open-air memorial with information boards.

Before the mine, have lunch in Zabłocie, the old industrial quarter around the factory, where warehouses and workshops have turned into cafés and restaurants, a few minutes from the station. Try maczanka po krakowsku, Kraków's own sandwich, slow-cooked pork in its gravy in a soft roll, or a plate of placki ziemniaczane, crisp potato pancakes, with sour cream or goulash.

Take the train from Kraków Zabłocie to Wieliczka Rynek-Kopalnia, about 20 minutes. Salt was mined at Wieliczka for 700 years, and in the 14th century, together with the mine at Bochnia, it brought in up to a third of the royal treasury's income. It was one of the first twelve places ever put on the UNESCO World Heritage list, in 1978.

The tour takes you down about 800 wooden steps and through a few kilometers of tunnels and chambers, past underground lakes and statues carved by miners. The high point is the Chapel of St. Kinga, more than 100 meters down, a church the size of a ballroom where everything, from the floor tiles and the altar to the chandeliers, is carved out of salt. It's touristy, and it's also astonishing. A lift brings you back up.

Back in town, save some room for one of Kraków's odder institutions. Every evening except Sundays and church holidays, from 8pm until about 3am, a blue Nysa van parks by the Hala Targowa market hall and men in white coats grill kiełbasa, Polish sausage, over a wood fire next to it, as they've done since 1991. You get a sausage, bread and mustard on a paper plate, and you eat it standing up with everyone else in the queue.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum begins at Auschwitz I, the original camp set up in 1940 in former Polish army barracks, behind the gate with the words Arbeit macht frei. The brick blocks now hold the exhibitions: the evidence of what happened here, and the rooms full of what was taken from the people who arrived, their suitcases with names painted on them, shoes, glasses and hair.

A guided tour, which is how most people see it, lasts about three and a half hours in total and covers both parts of the camp. It's hard. It's meant to be.

A free shuttle bus runs three kilometers to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and nothing prepares you for the scale of it. This was the extermination camp: rows of barracks stretching to the tree line, the railway track running through the gatehouse to the ramp where people were selected on arrival, and at the far end the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria. One was burned in a prisoners' revolt in October 1944, and the SS blew up the others in the last weeks before the Red Army reached the camp on 27 January 1945.

Walk along the tracks to the memorial at the end, and take your time on the way back.

You won't feel like much this evening, and that's fine. Most people want somewhere calm, a simple dinner and a walk. A bowl of żurek, a plate of pierogi and a slow walk around the Planty or along the Vistula at dusk is about right.

In 1949 the communist government began building a new town next to a huge new steelworks east of Kraków. Nowa Huta was meant to be the ideal socialist city, full of loyal workers, and a lesson to conservative, Catholic, intellectual Kraków. The plan is grand, a Central Square with wide avenues fanning out from it lined with solid, rather handsome apartment blocks, and it works surprisingly well as a place to live.

It didn't work as a lesson. The workers wanted a church and fought for years to get one - in 1960, when the authorities tried to remove a cross from the plot they had once promised for a church, the streets of Nowa Huta turned into a riot. The Lord's Ark (Arka Pana), shaped like Noah's ark, was finally consecrated in 1977 by the Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, a year before he became Pope John Paul II. Nowa Huta later became one of the strongholds of Solidarity. Walk up Aleja Róż from the square, where a statue of Lenin stood until 1989, and on to the church.

Have lunch in Nowa Huta before you head back. Stylowa, at the start of Aleja Róż, has been open since 1956 and serves plain Polish food in a dining room that hasn't changed much since the steelworkers ate here. Come for the room more than the cooking, and order the classics: kotlet schabowy, the breaded pork cutlet that's Poland's Sunday dinner, with potatoes and cabbage, or bigos, the hunter's stew of sauerkraut and meat.

Back in the center, the Franciscan Basilica looks like just another old church from the outside. Inside are the stained glass windows Stanisław Wyspiański, painter, playwright and the leading light of Polish Art Nouveau, designed around 1900, flowers and saints in swirling color, and in the west window, above the organ loft, his God the Father - Let It Be, the Creator emerging from a storm of color. Come when the afternoon sun is behind it.

Across the street is the Bishops' Palace, and the window above its gate is where John Paul II, on his visits home as pope, used to lean out late into the night and talk to the crowds below.

Kraków has four big earth mounds, and Kościuszko Mound is the one to climb. It was raised by hand in 1820-23 in honor of Tadeusz Kościuszko, who led the uprising of 1794, the last attempt to save Poland before its neighbors divided up what was left of it, and it includes soil from his battlefields in Poland and America. The Austrians later built a fort around it.

A path spirals up to the top, about 35 meters high, with a view over the whole city to Wawel and, on clear days, south to the Tatra mountains. Below it, toward the center, lies Błonia, the huge meadow where John Paul II said mass for more than a million people, and on a fine day the walk back across it to the Old Town takes about 45 minutes.

For the last night, have dinner somewhere proper in the Old Town or Kazimierz: barszcz czerwony with uszka, the clear beetroot soup with tiny mushroom dumplings that starts every Polish Christmas Eve, then duck or pork with apples. Then go and learn about vodka the Polish way, which is slowly, with food, and never on its own.

A small vodka bar near the square will pour flights of nalewki, sweet or bitter fruit and herb liqueurs that every Polish grandmother makes from a family recipe, next to plain rye and potato vodkas and żubrówka, flavored with bison grass. Order śledź, pickled herring, to go with it, and say na zdrowie.