We’re not in a rush to get up today as, although there is more we could do in Krakow, we’re giving ourselves a chilled out day of exploring the Jewish Quarter and then in late afternoon we’ll go to the museum in (under!) the main square. Each city that we’ve been to we’ve thought we’d have a “day off” but as we’ve discovered more about each place we’ve not quite got round to this yet!
As with the castle yesterday, we decide to walk to Jewish Quarter instead of taking the tram. Although it’s close to the castle we take a different route from last time and we’re soon off the tourist route and on to regular shopping streets. It’s along here that we spy our first Sziget poster, which we get quite excited about.
We find the start of the area and slow our wandering down as we enter a square of cafes and restaurants that are all open with chairs outside in the sunshine. We don’t feel like stopping just yet, but find an information board which marks the different notable buildings in the district and a walking route through it. We try to memorize the first bit of the map and then set off on this walking tour; memorizing a few turns at a time in the hope that we’ll see the next board before we need to go any further.
It’s a nice area to explore, especially in the good weather and with quiet streets. The buildings are well preserved and we can definitely see that it is ‘up and coming’ with trendy looking bars, shops and cafes starting to appear. Our route takes us to what on the maps seems to be a market square but turns out to be almost a market octagon.
We circle the octagon which is in the square (if that is mathematically possible!). There are open air market stalls around a low central building. Only some of the stalls are open today; flowers, fresh veg and brick-a-brack. We wander through them and gradually approach the main building in the centre. The outside wall of the building has a small window on each of the many sides, and through the open windows they are selling hot drinks and simple snack foods. In front of each window is a single pair of chairs for the customers to sit on, and it’s a really sweet sight. Only a few of these are open and at one a customer sits on one of the two chairs that is catching the sun as the owner leans out of the small window to talk to him. As we round the building we find a single door between the stall windows, and this takes us behind the first layer of activity and into a market hall that is set up for a meat market with white tiles and high windows to keep it cool. As it’s mid-morning all signs of fresh market activity here have gone. This would be a great place to visit on market day – inside and out – and it’s a shame that we won’t be here for it.
After further meanderings around the Jewish Quarter, we find ourselves on the river and so take a walk along the bank towards the castle. The river path is wide and flat and, other than the occasional bicycle thundering past, it’s nice to be out of (or at least on the edge of) a city. The path is marked with kilometre intervals sprayed across it – we pass both 10km and 34km. We assume that at some point in the recent past they’ve used it for a race of some kind – and that the race involved a loop of some kind as we haven’t quite walked 24km on this meander. It’s perfect for that, to be honest – flat, wide and pretty. As we walk along we also laugh about how this is the first day without any threat of rain, and so we’re finally able to walk around without waterproofs strapped to the bag!
Finding ourselves beneath the castle walls, we decide it’s time to head back into town. We opt to follow the ‘university route’ – a series of paths through nice shady areas in the area once occupied by the city walls but which are now lined by the buildings of Krakow University. One stretch has a large and detailed display of John Paul II’s time as Pope, from his election in the late 1970s through to his death. There is, understandably, a focus on his visits to Poland. Indeed, our time in Poland has often felt like we’re following his route as every place he visited has a plaque or statue to commemorate it and we’ve seen plenty of them. Poland strikes us both as a place that is proud of its Catholic heritage, but also wants to celebrate its minorities. I guess this may be a result of their history in the first half of the twentieth century; after all, the large Jewish minority was wiped from Poland by the Nazis alongside other religious and minority groups. Compared to Egypt, where genocide has (thankfully) not taken place, religious minorities at least appear to be actively assimilated into Polish society whereas recent tensions in Egypt have suggested that claims of tolerance and acceptance are not played in the majority of communities.
Regarding the Pope, the thing that strikes us was his focus for people fighting against Communist rule. Indeed, our tour guide in the salt mine the previous day said how many Poles see John Paul II as one of the most significant – if not the most significant – force in bringing about democracy. It’s widely accepted by historians that the act of following the church in the years to 1989 was a form of dissent against the political system, but something doesn’t quite add up about this claim considering the continuing strength of the church over two decades on. For the people of Poland, it must surely be something more than ‘just’ a form of rebellion.
Our walk finishes with us back in the main square, where we look up a restaurant for lunch. The InYourPocket guides that we had previously used in Berlin and Warsaw comes in handy again in Krakow, suggesting a good places to eat on the main square with an unbeatable lunchtime menu. We’ve found that – considering it’s the main square – all the restaurants and cafes are amazingly affordable. Whereas you would normally expect to pay a significant premium to eat or drink in this location, here in Krakow it isn’t so different in price to places down the backstreets. It’s nice to take advantage of it.
We begin to realise that – shock horror – we now appear to have the afternoon free without anything planned. Our time-specific entry to the museum isn’t until much later this evening, and we enter an panic-like phase regarding how we’re going to fill our time! We’ve also got a fair bit of Polish cash left as we bought everything on card in Warsaw, thinking that Krakow was going to be more expensive than it turned out. We consider converting it to Forints to use in Hungary later in the trip, but instead decide to try to book an afternoon tour instead.
We’d read about the Crazy Guides in the InYourPocket guide, and they had also been mentioned in a couple of ‘insider’ tips in newspapers that we’d looked at in the UK. Their flyer was in the hotel when we arrived, and we had been discussing the possibility of going on a tour with them. Now that we found some spare time on our hands, and a bit of spare cash, we figured there would be no harm in going to their booking office to see if we could get on a tour with only an hour-or-so’s notice.
Finding the office, however, proved challenging. Firstly, we find our way blocked by a string of large generator trucks, cabling and caravans. We initially assume that the fair is coming to town, but turning a corner find ourselves being held back by security guards and police as an episode of a Polish police drama has chosen to film a scene in this street.
We hang around for the take to finish (we assume they won’t use this one as the main actor suddenly stops halfway through a speech, looks around, shrugs, and then laughs after which the director shouts an exasperated word that we assume means ‘cut’). Despite Scott’s experience as an extra in the Inspector Linley Mysteries we determine that they are unlikely to want to include us in the scene, and so on we go to find the Crazy Guys. Their flyer describes them as being based in the foyer of a hotel that we find without a problem. Their office, however, does not exist. It turns out that they have a simple deal with the hotel whereby the hotel receptionist phones the tour company on their mobile phone number, and hands the phone to you to arrange your trip. Considering we have only a 4-hour window in which to fit their 2.5 hour tour, the guy on the end of the phone is amazingly accommodating – they’ll pick us up from the hotel we’re phoning from in an hour. This leaves us just enough time to head back to our own hotel to pick up some of the aforementioned cash and drop off some of the various things we’ve been walking round with that we won’t need.
Back at the meeting point, we take a seat while we wait to be collected. We’re really not sure what to expect. The tour is ‘off the beaten track’ – a tour of the Socialist Realist town of Nowa Huta on the outskirts of Krakow where we’re due to be driven around in an original Trabant, by a native of Nowa Huta.
Before long, Kuba arrives. He’s an energetic and articulate guy, born in 1985 but with a fascination for what lie was like before the fall of the Iron Curtain. We walk the short distance to where he’s parked the ‘limousine’ as you can’t bring cars into the old town, and he cracks self-deprecating and sarcastic gags as we do so. We can immediately tell that we’re going to like this guy, and that we’re going to get a fascinating look at life in Poland.
There in the midst of the car park, surrounded by shiny contemporary vehicles, is a lime green cult car. Maintained in impeccable condition, this Trabant is one of a fleet of cars owned by the Crazy Guides who reckon that of all the Trabants in Poland they probably own the majority of them. Although he treats it with considerable disrespect, it’s clear that Kuba loves the car. He wrenches open the door (“you have to give it hard love, because otherwise the hinges buckle”) and winds down the window (“air conditioning – if you want it cooler I’ll just have to drive faster”). He jams a couple of levers to tilt the passenger seat forward and we both opt to climb in the back. He jumps in the driver’s seat and turns over the engine. The familiar noise of a 2-stroke engine starts up, running at unbelievably high revs. He stamps on the clutch and wrestles with the stick to get it in gear, and we’re off bouncing along in a plastic-bodied, lime green icon. Heads turn – this really is a car that gets you noticed. Kuba admits that his ‘normal’ car is a Fiat Punto, but that he much prefers to drive this around town because it gets people looking.
We turn away from the old town and merge onto a three-lane road similar to those we’ve previously seen in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Berlin. Built in the 1950s, these road systems were designed not with traffic jams in mind, but rather to be able to bring in tanks in case of public disorder. These roads have all seen such action at some point as the Warsaw Pact countries set out to crush dissent.
We park up. “Don’t bother locking the doors – the locks are crap anyway”. We’re taken into an original Socialist-era cafe for a drink and an explanation of the area we’re in. It’s still got its original name, Cafe Stylish. “That’s Socialist Realism. If it’s a stylish cafe, you should say so.” Inside we notice lights hanging from the ceiling almost identical to those that had been in photos of the Palace of Culture in Berlin. A small statue of Lenin is fixed to a table the corner. “I usually do something to disrespect him, but there’s a guy who sometimes comes in here who misses the old days and asks that I don’t do anything bad to Lenin if he’s around.”
We’re shown a well-thumbed booklet of photos of the Nowa Huta. It’s the perfect model of urban planning. Built from scratch from 1949 onwards the entire settlement was built as a semi-circular system of wedged segments emerging from a central square. At the end of the main boulevard is the Nowa Huta steelworks factory itself (Nowa Huta translates as “New Steelworks” – another piece of classic Socialist Realist predictability). Each part of the settlement was planned to the smallest detail from housing to shops, sports facilities, schools, hospitals and even artificial lakes. It reminds me of Magnetogorsk, the famed planned city in Russia built – again – as a planned community to provide labour for a massive steelworks. Nowa Huta was built by Poles for Poles; enormous urban migration occurred as people saw the opportunity not only for work, but also for the chance to ‘build your own house’.
Quite why it was built, or at least why it was built here, suggests a one-track-mind of the highest order. According to Kuba, Stalin wanted a symbol of the ‘new’ world order to offset Krakow’s standing as a place for art, culture and higher education. Indeed, Nowa Huta became such a jewel in the crown of the Soviet Bloc that even Che Guevara came to visit this symbol of the socialist future. According to local legend he did indeed visit, but stayed in a hotel in Krakow: Nowa Huta didn’t have a 5 Star hotel.
Kuba speaks at length about what life was like under socialist rule. Although he was only 4 or 5 years old when the system changed, he vividly remembers being bought his first Lego toys from the sole Western-import shop. He confides that his parents are reluctant to talk about what life was like. They, he says, prefer to think about the future. His grandparents, however, talk to him a lot. His grandfather worked as an engineer in North Vietnam but, despite earning enormous amounts of money, was unable to spend much of it – goods were simply not available to buy at home. Our grounding in ‘day to day’ life gleaned from the DDR Museum in Berlin comes in helpful to understand the economics of such a situation.
From the cafe, where we pay a lady the equivalent of about 2 pence to go to the toilet, we walk down to the main plaza. The architecture is truly stunning, and it is understandable why this area is becoming gentrified. The central square, close to major amenities and transport links, would be a fantastic place to live and – thanks to the number of people wanting to get away from Nowa Huta and everything it used to represent – the price of property has been ludicrously low. Capitalism is stamped on the square, having been named after Ronald Reagan whom the Poles apparently hold in high esteem as the man who forced the end of the Cold War and thus the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The area’s growing cult status among young trendies is regenerating the central areas, but it becomes obvious as we drive up one of the main boulevards towards the steelworks that the rest of Nowa Huta is still a hard place to live. Despite having to import raw materials the steelworks is still running, but mechanisation has decreased the number of jobs available and most people living in the area have to travel outside the area to work. We also learn about the increased emphasis on getting financial and hi-tech industries into the city to reduce the number of young people leaving for the likes of Warsaw. Outside the steelworks – the Huta of the town name – the Trabant poses for a few photographs. The steelworks themselves are now owned by an Indian company.
To end the tour of Nowa Huta we are due to go and see the modern church that has been built in the suburb, but Kuba is in a good mood (and likes showing off his favourite car we think!) and so he gives us a choice; see the church or take the Trabbie for a test drive. Unable to refuse we find ourselves being driven up a single-track road into some dense trees. Kuba reassures us that this is nothing too dodgy, but simply that we have to get off the public road if we’re to get into the driving seat.
Kuba does a good job of reminding us where the pedals are – over the last three years Scotty’s only driven in the summer months and Alice has only driven a dozen times since getting her licence – and then introduces us to the gear shift. Like the old Citroen 4CV it’s a stick shift on the right-hand side of the wheel with neutral, first and second on one level and then a pull forward (or is it back?) to find third and fourth.
Scotty is up first and takes off well, easing her through the gears. Over the roar of the engine Kuba asks if he’s driven a Trabbie before and says that a job with the Crazy Guys is here for him if he wants one! Alice is up next and obviously a bit more cautious, but getting up to speed and pulling the wheel into full lock manages a tight turning circle at the top of the road.
Kuba drives us back into town and we keep chatting about the old and the new. It’s fascinating to see how the nostalgia and gentrification interact with the desire to move on and progress towards the future. It’s been a brilliant tour and Kuba has had just the right balance between being happy to talk without prompt and also answer our questions. We get out of the Trabant not far from the town centre on a real high and it’s amazing to think that earlier in the day we had decided we didn’t have time for this but now it’s been a real highlight. We could have learnt most of it from a book; the history of Nowa Huta and life in Eastern Europe during communism (as we’d read a lot about in the DDR Museum in Berlin), but the tour gave this along with the personal side and anecdotes that make it feel ‘real’ and engage you. Also, after the group tours of the salt mine and Auschwitz, it was really great to have just two of us with a guide and for it to still be someone so interested and passionate about what they are showing you.
We quick foot it from the edge of town into the main square and descend underneath the cloth market to the newest museum in Krakow. In 2006 they re-cobbled the main square, and used the opportunity to see if they could find the original buildings and street foundations that were assumed to be below. When they did indeed find them they decided it was too fragile to simply excavate but too interesting to simply cover back up. They chose to install beams and create a concrete roof over the excavation site, giving complete access to the old levels. It is so cool to think that above the concrete roof is life continuing as normal on the street on top of you, while down here you can see the original buildings and foundations of the market square.
The digging took place at different levels and so as we walk around the museum we find old streets exposed and in some places these have been excavated further to show even older layers of streets below – the different surfaces and edging marking out the age. The displays are in English and Polish and the labels give basic information, but we find some touch screens to give us more depth. The most interesting area of the museum, though, is the final one where the walkway takes you along the original cloth market and you can see the walls and doorways marking out each storefront along the run. The visit ends with a series of screening rooms which we wish we had time to visit in turn, but watching a film about the original dig and formation of the museum, and then one on the building of Nowa Huta, is all we can find time for before our stomachs tell us it is time to find some dinner.
We’ve wandered down the ‘embassy street’ a couple of times in the last few days and it has always looked busy and lively there. We’ve resolved that even though we’d be very happy to go back to some of the restaurants we’ve already been to, we should try somewhere new and so make a bee-line towards it. We end up in a small place with a good few choices of beers and food and soon find ourselves tucking in to another delicious meal. Scott orders a ‘dark’ beer and ends up with half a litre of Okocim Porter at a whopping 8.3%!
The place seems family-run when we look around at the staff, and this is confirmed in our minds when at the end of the meal we find out they don’t accept cards. With all our talk earlier in the day about having so much cash to spend we’re suddenly scraping around in our wallets and are really lucky to have just enough money to pay the bill without having to go to a cash machine!
With the equivalent of just 3 pence left in our pocket we head to a small supermarket where we know we can use card to buy a few supplies for the epic train journey tomorrow that will take us from Poland, through the Czech Republic to Slovakia! And, happy in the knowledge that we have completely exhausted our means in Poland, we head to bed.
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