Sights in Poland
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Auschwitz
Established within disused army barracks in 1940, Auschwitz was initially designed to hold Polish prisoners, but was expanded into the largest centre for the extermination of European Jews. Two more camps were subsequently established: Birkenau and Monowitz. In the course of their operation, between one and 1.5 million people were killed.
Auschwitz was only partially destroyed by the fleeing Nazis, so many of the original buildings remain as a bleak document of the camp's history. A dozen of the 30 surviving prison blocks house sections of the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The cinema in the visitors centre shows a short documentary film about the liberation of the camp…
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Salt Mine
Just outside the administrative boundaries of Kraków, some 14km southeast of the city centre, Wieliczka (vyeh- leech -kah) is famous for its ultra-deep Salt Mine, which has been in continuous operation for 700 years and can be visited. It’s an eerie world of pits and chambers, and everything has been carved by hand from salt blocks. The mine was included on Unesco’s World Heritage List in 1978.
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Monastery of Jasna Góra
Impressive though it is, the exterior of Monastery of Jasna Góra gives little indication of the grandeur layered behind its walls. Exploring this functioning monastery gives a fascinating insight into its history, and a deep appreciation for its present day relevance. Arrive early and take your time.
You are free to wander around the complex at your own leisure (crowds permitting). Audio guides are available for four routes; the most important covers the main sanctuary and takes 45 minutes.
In the oldest part of the complex, the Chapel of Our Lady (Kaplica Cudownego Obrazu) contains the revered Black Madonna.The picture is ceremoniously unveiled at 06:00 and 13:30 (14:00 …
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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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Cathedral of Ss John the Baptist & John the Evangelist
Of the historical buildings outside the museum’s administration, the largest and most impressive is the giant Gothic Cathedral of SS John the Baptist & John the Evangelist. Work started around 1260 and was only completed at the end of the 15th century, by which time the church dominated the town’s skyline, as it still does today. Its massive tower houses Poland’s second-largest historic bell (after the one in the Wawel Royal Cathedral of Kraków), the Tuba Dei (God’s Trumpet). Cast in 1530, it weighs 7238kg and is rung for significant religious and national events. On the southern side of the tower, facing the Vistula, is a large 15th-century clock; its original face and…
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Former Jewish Ghetto
Before WWII, much of Warsaw's thriving Jewish community lived in Mirów and Muranów, two districts to the west of Al Jana Pawła II. It was here that the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, which was razed after the 1943 Ghetto Uprising. Today the area is characterised by cheap, communist-era apartment buildings, but a few remnants of Jewish Warsaw still survive in the former Jewish Ghetto. It is a large area to cover on foot, but fortunately the main sights are clustered together in the northern part.
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Ul Próżna
Ul Próżna, a short street leading off Plac Grzybowski, opposite the Teatr Żydowski (the Jewish Theatre), is an eerie and incongruous survivor of WWII. Its crumbling, unrestored redbrick façades, the ornamental stucco long since ripped away by bomb blasts, are still pockmarked with bullet and shrapnel scars. A few blocks to the south, in the courtyard of an apartment building at ul Sienna 55, stands one of the few surviving fragments of the redbrick wall that once surrounded the Warsaw Ghetto.
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Ruins of the Castle
History buffs should take the opportunity to check out the remnants of the town's original medieval fortifications. To the east, in a triangle squeezed between the Old and New Towns, are the Ruins of the Castle, built by the Teutonic Knights. It was destroyed by the town's inhabitants in 1454 as a protest against the order's economic restrictions (they must have been really ticked off - those Teutonic castles were solidly built).
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St Mary's Church
Rising over the northeastern corner of Rynek Główny, St Mary's is Kraków's most important church, after Wawel Cathedral. The original church, built in the 1220s, was destroyed during the Tatar raids, and the edifice you see today is a 15th-century creation. From the outside, the most striking feature of the church is its two towers, of unequal height.
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Parish Church
The Parish Church was originally built for the Jesuits by architects from Italy. After more than 80 years of work (1651–1732), an impressive baroque church was created, with an ornamented façade and a lofty interior supported on massive columns and crammed with monumental altars.
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Church of St John of Jerusalem
One of the oldest brick churches in the country, this late-12th-century building was extended in the Gothic period and later acquired a baroque chapel. The interior contains beautiful Gothic star vaults, and the Romanesque doorway in the main western entrance is magnificent.
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Weigh House
The Weigh House is a postwar replica of the 16th-century building designed by Quadro, which was dismantled in the 19th century. South of it are two discordant postwar structures on the site of the old arsenal and cloth hall.
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Amber Museum
The Foregate is home to the Amber Museum, wherein you can marvel at the history of Baltic gold.
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Oskar Schindler’s Enamelware Factory
About 400km east of Plac Bohaterów Getta is Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory.
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Royal Castle
This massive brick edifice, now a marvellous copy of the original that was blown up by the Nazis towards the end of the war, began life as a wooden stronghold of the dukes of Mazovia in the 14th century. Its heyday came in the mid-17th century, when it became one of Europe's most splendid royal residences, and during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski (1764-95) when its grand Baroque apartments were created. It then served the tsars, and in 1918, after Poland had regained its independence, it became the residence of the president. Today it is filled with period furniture, works of art, and an army of old ladies watching your every move.
Two floors of the castle are…
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St Mary's Church
Set in the middle of Main Town, St Mary's Church is believed to be the largest old brick church in the world. It is 105m long and 66m wide at the transept, and its massive squat tower is 78m high. About 25,000 people can be easily accommodated in its 5000-sq-metre (0.5-hectare) interior. It's a fascinating building to look at even from a few streets away, as its weathered red brickwork looms in a somewhat sinister manner over the much smaller, more thoroughly redecorated buildings at its feet.
The church was begun in 1343 and reached its present gigantic size in 1502. It served as the parish church for the Catholic congregation until the Reformation blew into Gdańsk, and …
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Palace & National Museum
The tiny village of Rogalin, 12km west of Kórnik, was the seat of yet another Polish aristocratic clan, the Raczyński family, who built a palace here in the closing decades of the 18th century, and lived in it until WWII. Plundered but not damaged during WWII, the palace was taken over by the state.
In 1991, Count Edward Raczyński, who had been Polish ambassador to Britain at the outbreak of WWII and a leading figure in the Polish government in exile, reaffirmed the use of the palace as a branch of Poznań's National Museum. Less visited than Kórnik's castle and much more Germanic in its appearance, the Rogalin palace consists of a massive, two-storey, baroque central st…
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Oliwa Cathedral
An important and unusual example of ecclesiastical architecture, the Cathedral's first surprise is its façade, a striking composition of two slim octagonal Gothic towers with a central Baroque portion squeezed between them. You enter the church by going downstairs, for its floor is more than a metre below the external ground level. The interior looks extraordinarily long, mainly because of the unusual proportions of the building - the nave and chancel together are 90m long but only 8.3m wide.
At the far end of this 'tunnel' is a Baroque high altar (1688), while the previous oak-carved Renaissance altar (from 1606) is now in the left-hand transept. Opposite, in the right …
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Statue of Marian Rejewski
In the newer part of town, a block north of Hotel Pod Orłem on ul Gdańska, you can find a seated statue of celebrated Bydgoszcz citizen and mathematician Marian Rejewski (1905-1980). Conservatively depicted in suit and glasses, the great mathematician is seated modestly on a bench. Next to him is the likeness of an Enigma machine, the device he once defeated.
Mathematicians are usually stereotyped as bookish, unworldly creatures. But not so Bydgoszcz-born Rejewski, who took on the Nazi ciphers to become one of the heroes of WWII.
Rejewski was teaching at Poznań University in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power, when he was seconded to the Polish army's Cipher Bureau…
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Castle
Despite its relatively friendly façade, the 14th-century Castle has a grim history. It was rebuilt as a prison in the 1820s and remained so until 1954. During WWII, more than 100,000 people suffered here at the hands of Nazi occupiers before being transported on to extermination camps. Hundreds of Jewish and Polish political prisoners had survived here until July 1944, only to be shot mere hours before the Red Army liberated the city.
Since 1957, the castle has housed the Lublin Museum with a collection ranging from silverware and porcelain to woodcarvings and weaponry. The particularly impressive art includes big names (such as Jacek Malczewski) and big pictures, such a…
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Town Hall
Poznań's Renaissance Town Hall, topped with a 61m-high tower, instantly captures your attention. Its graceful form replaced the 13th-century Gothic town hall, which was consumed by fire in the early 16th century, along with much of the town. It was designed by Italian architect Giovanni Battista Quadro and constructed from 1550 to 1560; only the tower is a later addition, built in the 1780s after its predecessor collapsed.
The crowned eagle on top of the spire, with an impressive wingspan of 2m, adds some Polish symbolism.The main eastern façade is embellished with a three-storey arcade. Above it is a painted frieze depicting kings of the Jagiellonian dynasty, and a cloc…
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Yacht Charters
Giżycko has the largest number of yacht-charter agencies in the area, and accordingly offers the widest choice of boats. The town is also a recognised centre for disabled sailors, with regular national regattas, and many companies provide specialist equipment, advice and training.
With yachting such a huge business here, the boat-charter market is highly volatile and operators often change. The tourist office is likely to have the current list of agents (sometimes up to 40) and can provide advice. It's also worth getting a copy of the monthly yachting magazine Żagle, in which plenty of firms advertise, or the multi-lingual Informator Źeglarski.
Finding anything in July …
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Old Town
The Old Town was rebuilt from the foundations up because after the war it was nothing but a heap of rubble. The monumental reconstruction, which took place between 1949 and 1963, aimed at restoring the appearance of the town in its best times, the 17th and 18th centuries. Every authentic architectural fragment found among the ruins was incorporated in the restoration.
In 1945, the Old Town Square was just the walls of two houses sticking out of the rubble, today it is a harmonious blend of Renaissance, baroque and Gothic elements. It's alive and atmospheric, doesn't feel contrived, and is replete with open-air cafés and art stalls. The Historical Museum of Warsaw occupi…
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Kurowo & Uhowo
The main starting points for exploring the park are the tiny hamlet of Kurowo and the village of Uhowo. Kurowo sits on the left (western) bank of the Narew, connected to the outer world only by a rough road, which rarely sees a passing car. Its central point is a late-19th-century country mansion that houses the Narew National Park Headquarters and a small exhibition on the park's natural history.
There's no restaurant so bring your own food or time your visit to coincide with the Podlasie Honey Feast (last weekend of August) on the last weekend of August. It's the biggest party on the national park's calendar, with beekeepers and local folk artists gathering to promote t…
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Castle of the Pomeranian Dukes
The mother of all Szczecin monuments is the Castle of the Pomeranian Dukes . This vast, blocky building looms over the Old Town, but the square central courtyard and simple Renaissance-style decoration atop the walls has a certain understated grace (spot the repeated circular pattern that resembles the Yin and Yang symbol).
The castle was originally built in the mid-14th century and grew into its current form by 1577, but was destroyed by Allied carpet bombing in 1944 before being extensively restored.
Admire the colourful historic clockface from the courtyard, with its jester figure chiming in each new hour, then climb to the top of the 58.6m bell tower for a view of the…
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