Kraków

Distance

18.2 km

Time

about 5 hours

Streets

43

Steps

4 streets with steps

Start point

Zamek Królewski na Wawelu

Phone needed while walking

no

Works offline

yes

Expires

never

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Zamek Królewski na Wawelu 1,500 points

  The rock, and everything anybody ever put on it. Take the ramp rather than the stair if your legs are being honest with you. Then find the way down into the cave underneath: there is a hole in this lump of limestone, it has a name of its own, and something is supposed to have lived in it. Best texture on the board. I would know.

• Bazylika archikatedralna Świętych Stanisława i Wacława 500 points

  Look up before you go in. Three large old bones hang on a chain over the entrance. What they came off, and why the city would very much like them to stay up there, the cathedral can tell you itself. Then push the door. The door alone is worth the walk up.

• Bazylika Wniebowzięcia Najświętszej Maryi Panny 500 points

  Two towers, and they do not match. Stand on the small square along its east flank, wait for the hour, and listen to the taller one. Whatever comes out of it stops halfway. I know why. I am not telling you.

• Rynek Główny 500 points

  The biggest empty thing on this level, and the reason every street here leans towards it. Find the small church at the south corner. It is sitting at the wrong angle to everything around it, because it was already standing when the rest was set out. One stubborn little building against an entire city plan, and the building won.

• Barbakan 250 points

  It was put up to sit hard against the town, and now it does not: a road and a strip of park have opened up between them, so it stands by itself on the grass with nothing to hold on to. I know the feeling. Go all the way about the base. Nothing else here is that circular.

• Brama Floriańska 250 points

  The one place on this level where you go under the old defences rather than past them. A piece of wall is left standing on either hand, and on a dry day it is hung end to end with paintings for sale. A wall that has found itself a second job. Fine by me.

• Collegium Maius 250 points

  Walk in off the street and stand in the yard. On the wall there is a clock that does not merely tell the time: a few times a day it opens up, and things come out of it and pass by in order. The first is late in the morning. I am not saying what comes out.

• Sukiennice 250 points

  A long hall sitting out in the open with the square all round it, which ought to be in the way and somehow is not. Go in at one end and out at the other. Inside it is a covered lane with counters down both sides, doing the job it was put there to do. A building I can eat lengthways. Very tidy.

• Wieża Ratuszowa 250 points

  There was a town hall attached to this once. It came down in the nineteenth century and the tower was left standing where it was, alone in the open with nothing to lean against. It leans anyway, very slightly, and once you have seen that you cannot unsee it.

Eating

Actual food.

Two things you can eat here are protected across Europe by name, and both of them are bread. One is a ring you buy off a cart on a street corner. The other is a loaf that comes in at fourteen kilos. Grain came down from the mills on the Prądnik stream, salt came up from the mine at Wieliczka, and the bakers of Kraków held the right to sell on the market square. The rest of the food here is what you eat standing up.

Checked 5 September 2026.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Everything here begins with the rock. Wawel is Jurassic limestone, about 228 metres up, and it set roughly 150 million years ago. It stands over the Vistula with water and marsh all around it, which is why people have been settling on top of it since the Palaeolithic, and why by the ninth century it was the centre of the Vistulan tribes. The stone buildings went up there first and the settlement clusters grew underneath. So the town you walk is the part that came second. A hundred and fifty million years. I have managed six hundred and thought I was doing well.

Sources: wawel.krakow.pl; www.krakow.pl; zabytek.pl

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

990–1320

The Piasts. Around 990 the stronghold on the rock found itself inside the Piast state, and from about 1000 a bishop was living up there too. Under Casimir the Restorer it became the chief ducal seat, which is the polite way of saying the argument about who was in charge had finally produced a winner. The era closes in 1320 with a coronation in the cathedral that ended the long stretch when Poland was several Polands at once.

Sources: zabytek.pl

1320–1596

Kings, and a capital. Kraków became the capital of Poland and the sixteenth century is its loud one: this was the main door through which Renaissance ideas arrived from Italy, and the rock and the square both still show it. Then in 1596 Sigismund III Vasa began moving the royal court to Warsaw and finished the job in 1611. Fifteen years to pack.

Sources: zabytek.pl

1596–1795

Gone, and not gone. The court sat in Warsaw, but Kraków stayed the formal capital of the country right up to the last partition, and rulers kept coming back here to be crowned until 1734. For a hundred and thirty-eight years this was a place people travelled to in order to become something, and then left again.

Sources: zabytek.pl

1795–1918

Austria. After the third partition the Austrians took the town, and between 1815 and 1846 it was briefly a formally independent republic of its own. That short window is when Kraków was modernised, extended, and relieved of most of its walls. Then Austria again, for another seventy-two years.

Sources: zabytek.pl

1918–

Poland. On 31 October 1918 Kraków was the first Polish city to have its independence back, and it managed that eleven days before the state it now belonged to officially came into being. The town was Polish again before Poland was.

Sources: www.krakow.pl

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. Look at the Old Town on a map and you find a green ring with no ends. That ring is the wall. The Austrians started pulling the fortifications down at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one short piece at the north end was argued into staying, and between 1822 and 1830 a municipal garden was laid out on the empty strip. It runs about four kilometres round, covers twenty-one hectares and is divided into eight gardens. The only wall I have met that you can walk through anywhere you like.

   Sources: www.krakow.pl; zabytek.pl

2. One street here is older than the plan. Kanonicza runs up to the foot of the rock and it was already in place before the charter, in the district they called Okół. When the surveyors ruled the rest of the town into quarters in the thirteenth century, they went around it. Walk it and you can feel the grid let go: the corners stop being right angles and the line bends the way a path bends rather than the way a drawing does. Oldest line on this level, and it tastes like it.

   Sources: zabytek.pl

3. The first institution of higher learning in Poland opened here in 1364, and the west side of this level has never stopped being a university since. Gołębia, Jagiellońska, Świętej Anny: lecture rooms, notice boards, and a remarkably high density of people carrying folders. Six and a half centuries of the same walk to the same doors. I get a little of every one of them.

   Sources: zabytek.pl

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 43streets
• 905dots
• 14.1km of street
• 18.2km on foot
• 5hours at a stroll