Tours in Krakow

Walk into the Main Market Square early enough and you get it almost to yourself, just the pigeons and the clatter of the Cloth Hall shutters going up. Give it an hour and it fills with horse-drawn carriages, trumpet calls from the tower on the hour, and tourists photographing the symmetry of it all. This is where most people start in Krakow, and there is no good reason to fight that instinct. The square sits at the centre of a street plan that has barely bent out of shape, so almost everything else in the old town, the Barbican, the Florian Gate, the long run of townhouses, can be reached on foot from here without once needing a map.

Spend a second day and the city opens sideways. Wawel Hill rises at the edge of the old town with its castle and cathedral stacked on top of each other, and the walk up is one of those climbs that earns the view at the end of it. Below, along the Vistula, Kazimierz spreads out with its synagogues, courtyards and milk bars, a district that was the centre of Jewish life in Krakow for generations and still carries that weight in its quiet squares and cemetery walls. It is also, these days, where a lot of the city eats and drinks, so the history and the present sit close together without much separating them.

That closeness is really the thing about Krakow. It looks, at first glance, like a postcard of old Poland, all spires and market stalls, and then you notice a plaque, a gap between buildings, a name on a wall, and the twentieth century presses back in. The years of German occupation reshaped the city in ways that are still legible if you know where to look, from the Jagiellonian University, where professors were taken from their lecture halls, to the Franciscan Church, to buildings that once served very different purposes than they do now. A guided walk through that history, built around the Old Town's own streets and squares, gives you a version of Krakow that the square alone does not show.

Further out, Nowa Huta offers a completely different register, a planned district of wide avenues and blocky grandeur built as a counterweight to the old city's churches and merchants. You do not need to choose between these versions of Krakow. They sit a tram ride apart, and most visitors end up seeing some of each, often without quite planning to.