Historic sights in Kraków
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Kazimierz
Today one of Kraków's inner suburbs and located within walking distance south of Wawel and the Old Town, Kazimierz was for a long time an independent town with its own municipal charter and laws. Its colourful history was determined by its mixed Jewish-Polish population, and though the ethnic structure is now wholly different, the architecture gives a good picture of its past, with clearly distinguishable sectors of what were Christian and Jewish quarters.
The suburb is home to many important tourist sights, including churches, synagogues and museums. The western part of Kazimierz was traditionally Catholic, and although many Jews settled here from the early 19th century…
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Podgórze
The working-class suburb of Podgórze would pique few travellers' curiosities if it wasn't for the notorious role it played during WWII. It was here that the Nazis herded some 15,000 Jews into a ghetto and continued to empty it by way of deportations to the concentration camps, including one a short distance to the southwest in Płaszów.
The centre of the ghetto was Plac Zgody, the ironically named 'Peace Square' that is today known as Plac Bohaterów Getta, where the process of selecting who would stay and who would be placed on the waiting train to one of the camps was made. Today it is marked by a memorial by Kraków architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak consisti…
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C
Nowa Huta
Nowa Huta is a result of the postwar rush towards industrialisation. In the early 1950s a gigantic steelworks and a new town to serve as a bedroom community for its workforce, were built about 10km east of the centre of Kraków. The steel mill accounted for nearly half the national iron and steel output, and the suburb has become a vast urban sprawl, populated by over 200,000 people.
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