Kraków

• 1. Introduction

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  Kraków sits on the Vistula River in southern Poland, and for roughly six centuries it was the royal capital of a kingdom, the seat of an empire, the target of conquerors, and the cradle of some of the oldest institutions in Europe. With a population of 804,237 as of 2023, it is Poland's second-largest city today. Yet the numbers barely hint at the weight of what happened here. Its Old Town was among the very first sites in the world to receive UNESCO World Heritage status, granted in 1978. In the same year, the city's archbishop was elected pope. And its name itself is disputed, possibly derived from a legendary dragon-slaying ruler, possibly from the word for a crow or raven. What kind of city carries all of this at once? How did it survive the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, the Swedish sacking of the 17th century, and the Nazi occupation of the 20th, while managing to preserve more of its architectural fabric than almost any other old European capital? And how did a district called Nowa Huta, built as a Stalinist industrial counterweight to all that history, end up becoming a monument in its own right? The story of Kraków is the story of how a place refuses to become only one thing.

• 2. Dragon, Crow, or Krak

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  The first written record of Kraków's name dates to 965, when a traveller described it as a notable commercial centre. The city itself is older than that text by at least two centuries. Human settlement at Wawel Hill goes back to the Stone Age, and the Vistulans, a Lechitic tribe, had established a fortified community there by around the 8th century. The name Kraków is an archaic Polish possessive form, meaning roughly "Krak's town", after Krakus, the mythical ruler said to have founded the settlement above a cave where the dragon Smok Wawelski lived. The first written mention of Prince Krakus dates to 1190, though historians are divided on where the name actually came from. One competing theory holds that it derives from a word meaning crow or raven. The true origin has never been settled with any consensus. In English, the city spent centuries being called Cracow, a heavily anglicised form. The unmodified spelling Kraków only became the dominant English variant in the 2000s. Foreign-language versions still scatter across a map of European pronunciation: German and Dutch Krakau, Yiddish Krake, Hungarian Krakkó, Ukrainian Krakiv. The city's full official Polish name, Stołeczne Królewskie Miasto Kraków, translates as Royal Capital City of Kraków, carrying a title earned centuries before Warsaw existed as a capital.

• 3. Capital of a Kingdom

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  In 1038, Kraków became the seat of the Polish government under the Piast dynasty, launching what would be nearly six centuries of royal authority concentrated here. The city grew quickly. By the end of the 10th century it was a leading trade centre, and brick buildings were going up: the Royal Wawel Castle with the St. Felix and Adaukt Rotunda, Romanesque churches, a cathedral, a basilica. The Mongols attacked in 1241, burning the city to the ground. It was rebuilt almost identically, formally incorporated in 1257 by the high duke Bolesław V the Chaste under Magdeburg law, which offered new tax benefits and trade privileges. A second Mongol raid struck in 1259; a third, in 1287, was repelled by newly built fortifications. The city's fortunes rose sharply again in 1364, when King Casimir III the Great founded the University of Kraków. It was the second oldest university in central Europe, after Charles University in Prague. As a member of the Hanseatic League and the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, Kraków drew craftsmen, guilds, and intellectuals from across the continent. The 15th and 16th centuries were known as Poland's Złoty Wiek, its Golden Age. In 1473, Kasper Straube printed the Calendarium Cracoviense, the first work ever printed in Poland. The artist Hans Dürer, younger brother of the more famous Albrecht Dürer, served as court painter to Sigismund I. In 1520, the bell named Zygmunt, cast by Hans Behem, was hung at Wawel Cathedral, where it still rings today for the most solemn occasions.

• 4. The Fall from Capital

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  In 1572, King Sigismund II Augustus died without an heir. He was the last of the Jagiellons, the dynasty that had made Kraków one of the cultural centres of Renaissance Europe. The Polish throne passed to Henry III of France and then to a series of foreign-based rulers, each transfer further eroding the city's grip on power. The decisive blow came in 1596, when Sigismund III of the House of Vasa moved the administrative capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from Kraków to Warsaw. The city was not destroyed; it was simply left behind. The Swedish invasion of the 1650s destabilised the region, and the 1655 siege brought pillaging. In 1707, a bubonic plague outbreak killed 20,000 of the city's residents. By the mid-1790s, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned twice by Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and Prussia. In 1794, Tadeusz Kościuszko launched an insurrection in Kraków's Main Square. He won the Battle of Racławice against a numerically superior Russian army, but the uprising ultimately failed and led to the third and final partition of Poland, placing Kraków under Habsburg rule. Napoleon briefly changed this in 1809, incorporating the city into the Duchy of Warsaw. After his defeat, the 1815 Congress of Vienna created the Free City of Kraków, a partially independent state that included 224 surrounding villages. The Free City's population grew from 23,000 to 43,000, but political instability led to the Kraków uprising of 1846, which Austrian authorities crushed. The Free City was then annexed into the Austrian Empire as the Grand Duchy of Kraków.

• 5. War, Occupation, and the Ghetto

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  At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, approximately 56,000 Jews lived in Kraków, nearly one quarter of the city's total population of about 250,000. By November 1939, that Jewish population had grown to approximately 70,000 as refugees arrived. On the 26th of October 1939, the Nazi regime established Distrikt Krakau, making the city the capital of the General Government, ruled from Wawel Castle by Governor-General Hans Frank. In November 1939, during an operation called Sonderaktion Krakau, more than 180 university professors and academics were arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. The German authorities moved to concentrate Jewish residents in a walled zone in the then-suburban neighborhood of Podgórze in March 1941. The largest deportations from the district came between June and September 1942. Mass deportation from Kraków's ghetto began in the first week of June 1942; the ghetto was finally liquidated in March 1943. Inhabitants were murdered or sent to the extermination camps at Bełżec and Auschwitz, or to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. Oskar Schindler selected workers from the ghetto for his enamelware factory Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik, saving them from deportation. The film director Roman Polanski also survived the ghetto. Soviet forces under Marshal Ivan Konev entered Kraków on the 18th of January 1945. Unlike Warsaw, which was systematically destroyed, Kraków's historic buildings and architectural fabric came through the war largely intact.

• 6. Steel, the Pope, and UNESCO

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  After the war, the new communist government of Poland set about transforming Kraków from a university city into an industrial one. The Stalinist government ordered construction of the country's largest steel mill in a newly built suburb to the east called Nowa Huta. The Lenin Steelworks, now known as the Sendzimir Steelworks, sealed that transformation. Nowa Huta was designed according to a Stalinist blueprint, with repetitious courtyards and wide, tree-lined avenues, and its soc-realist centre is today considered a significant architectural monument of the period. Universities were stripped of their printing rights and autonomy. Against this backdrop, Karol Wojtyła, who served as cardinal archbishop of Kraków from 1964 to 1978, spent two decades lobbying successfully for permission to build the first churches in the newly industrialised suburbs. In 1978, the Catholic Church elevated Wojtyła to the papacy as John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in over 450 years. In that same year, 1978, UNESCO placed Kraków Old Town on the first-ever list of World Heritage Sites. Two landmarks claimed by the same calendar year: a Polish pope for the first time in over four centuries, and the international recognition of a city that had held together through sackings, plagues, partitions, and war.

• 7. Living City

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  Kraków today hosts roughly 50 large multinational companies, including Google, IBM, and Uber, and is rated by the UN Conference for Trade and Development as the most emergent city for global business process outsourcing investment. In 2019, more than 14 million tourists visited, including 3.3 million from abroad, spending over 7.5 billion zloty in the city. The largest share of foreign visitors came from Germany, followed closely by the United Kingdom and Italy. Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364 as Studium Generale and renamed in 1817, holds more than 4 million volumes in the Jagiellonian Library, including Copernicus' De Revolutionibus. The Polish Aviation Museum, recognised by CNN as one of the world's best aviation museums, holds over 200 aircraft. In the Market Square, St. Mary's Basilica features the wooden altarpiece carved by Veit Stoss, the largest Gothic altarpiece in the world. Every hour, a trumpet call rings out from the basilica tower, breaking off unfinished in the middle of the melody, as it has for centuries, in memory of a medieval guard who, according to tradition, was shot by a Mongol archer mid-note. The story was told in Eric P. Kelly's 1928 book The Trumpeter of Krakow, which won a Newbery Award. Kraków was named European Capital of Culture in 2000 and a UNESCO City of Literature in 2013. The city hosted the European Games in 2023, with more than 7,000 athletes from 49 countries, and a metro line is planned with first works expected to begin in 2028.