Day 11: Second Day in Kraków

Today was our second day in Kraków. The weather held up from the weekend and it was a beautiful day!

Kraków was the capital of the Kingdom of Poland (1385-1569) until King Sigismund III Vasa moved the capital to Warsaw in 1596. Our goal for the day was to tour around Wawel Hill. Just south of the old town, Wawel is a very old fortified complex whose main features are the Wawel Cathedral and the Royal Castle. The oldest stone buildings at Wawel date back to the 10th century. The site is especially important to Poles, as the crypts beneath the cathedral are the burial site of polish kings and prominent historical figures.

Our first stop was to climb up the top of one of the fortification towers (like the one you can see on the right in the previous picture). 

Next we climbed up one of the bell towers. This was a really cool way to see the inside construction, but the lack of people and rough nature of the directions had us second guessing whether we were where we were supposed to be!

Nevertheless, several steep stair cases and precarious walkways later we made it to the top!

After that exciting trip we toured the cathedral and crypts (no pictures allowed :( ).

Our next stop was the castle square! We're planning to tour the inside of the castle in the upcoming days but it was closed. We still got to see the courtyard which was very impressive.

The last stop on our Wawel tour was the Smocza Jama (Dragon' Den). There's a legend that a dragon once lived beneath Wawel hill and terrorized the town folk. To get down to the limestone cave, we take a long and increasingly cold/damp spiral stair case.

As we climbed down, Kuba caught a glimpse of the Wawel Dragon....

Or not!

The cave was really cool with lots of little holes and paths.

Outside, there's a large metal sculpture of the Dragon which breathes fire every few minutes.

We walked back to the Main Market Square along some of the old streets in Krakow.

And made it to the Collegium Maius (Great College), which is the oldest building of the Jagiellonian University, the first university in Poland. It is now famous as the university attended by Nicolaus Copernicus, in the 1490s.

We continued walking, through Plac Szczepański, which is surrounded by the Teatr Stary (the Old Theather, the oldest in Poland, not shown) and Palac Sztuki (the Fine Arts Society Building), shown below.

We then walked up Ulica Floriańska, which connects the Main Market Square and the Florian Gate, seen below. This street was part of the Royal Route, and polish rulers would ride along this street on the way to their coronation.

On a side note, we bought this book of fairy tales, and with lots of help from Kuba, Isabel is practicing reading in Polish!

We are a day behind in our blog, so this is actually the story from May 6th, and we will hopefully be posting again tonight, after our trip to the Wieliczka salt mines today!

xo