Everything that had been harsh and prosaic in Warsaw turned soft and lyrical here. The sun shone, children gamboled, poets strolled; the smoke from grilled kielbasa scented the air, and feather-hatted fiddlers ground out old polonaises. It was like leaving the gloomy confines of a boardroom for an afternoon at the fair.
The ancient city was washed in summer light as I exited the train station. As soon as I had checked into my hotel, I went out into the narrow streets — which I had not walked for 15 years — across the Market Square (the tower of the old Town Hall almost unrecognizable now that its brick was removed of soot) and up Sienna to Stolarska Street, where I saw Czeslaw Milosz emerging from a wedding at the Dominican Basilica of the Holy Trinity. There, in a blue blazer and thickly knotted tie, stood the 1980 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award that had not only brought worldwide attention to Polish poetry but had helped galvanize a struggling nation. He looked older than when I had last seen him, at a reading in Miami Beach, and he had added to his attire a cane and a snow-white goatee. I went over and introduced myself as an admirer from Florida. He looked appreciatively dazed but asked what found me in Krakow and then, sending me off, brought his two fists together in front of his stomach in a gesture of solicitude that seemed vaguely Buddhist.
I followed at a safe distance as he headed off with a threesome (it is not often that you get to trail a Nobel laureate). Two teen-agers in jeans passed him on the sidewalk; both looked at the bard and then at each other, then back again and then back at each other. When they came even with me, I confirmed it.
“Yes, that is Milosz.”
A city of poets, and people who recognize them.
Krakow has long been the cultural and intellectual heart of Poland. Its Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364, is one of the oldest in Europe; in the cathedral on Wawel Hill are interred the national heroes: kings, queens, generals, poets. Even after King Sigismund III moved to Warsaw in 1596, making that upstart city the capital, Krakow retained its civilizing importance. Its cafes, in the years preceding the First World War, spawned the literary movement known as “Young Poland,” and cabarets thrived in the bracing bohemian climate. Between the wars, in the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, Zionist pamphlets circulated and brilliant orators filled the synagogues.
The world of Kazimierz was destroyed by the Nazis, though Krakow was one of the few cities in Poland they left physically intact. After the war, the ruling Communists didn’t take kindly to Krakow — its aristocratic cast being a particular irritant — and built a spewing steelworks a few miles away. The facades of Renaissance palaces and Baroque churches eroded and cracked in the acidic air; residents suffered from an array of respiratory ailments. (The first time I saw Krakow, in the winter of 1978, the snow descended black.) But people throughout the country read the Catholic Krakow weekly Tygodnik Powszechny for moral and intellectual sustenance (it was the one Polish paper that actually indicated in the articles where something had been censored) and, during part of that period, a man by the name of Karol Wojtyla held the bishopric.
In the evening, I walked through the Planty, the green ribbon of park that encircles the old town, to the unrestrained hulk of the Slowacki Theater. There was a benefit concert and dinner for cancer research, and at intermission an elegant crowd milled around tables blubbery with aspic. The second half featured a one-man play, starring the eminent actor Jerzy Sztur. I sat in my balcony seat and thought how refreshing it was to be in a Polish theater and not have to listen for political allusions.
The regional office of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading newspaper, stood at No. 5 Szewska Street, a few doors down from the Market Square. I climbed two flights of wooden stairs and found a curious sight at the top: a computerized newsroom that had been plopped between the walls of a 14th Century townhouse. Welcoming me into it was Andrzej , who worked at my newspaper in the summer of 1995.
We walked outside and almost immediately entered the vast square, stately and animated in midafternoon. “This is the great thing about working here,” Andrzej said and, indeed, it was like stepping onto the set of a grand opera, with extras wandering about out of costume. We headed up Bracka Street to a restaurant named Guliwer.
“I ran into Milosz yesterday,” I said. “He came here for lunch.”
“See?” said Andrzej, smiling at his success as a reliable tour guide. “He lives here part of the year now. He’s in his late 80s, but he’s of that prewar generation from Vilnius and Lvov — they’re tough.”
Over cold beet soup, we caught up on news. Andrzej said the paper was doing very well, but it had recently gone public, so growing sales did not necessarily translate into increased salaries. He and his wife, a psychologist, had enough money for weekly expenses, but they weren’t able to put away much in savings. And, of course, there were people worse off.
“Krakow is not an industrial city,” he said, “so you don’t see a lot of poverty here. But if you go to places like Radom and Lodz, you’ll find it.”
I told him how beautiful I thought Krakow looked. I had lived in Warsaw for two years in the early ’80s, and out of loyalty to my adopted (and rebuilt) hometown I had always tried to resist Krakow’s antiquated charms, which was easier to do when they were seen through a persistent Communist haze. But now it seemed to me that the changes since ’89 had in some ways made Warsaw less attractive — with tasteless advertising and rampant greed — while causing Krakow to glow.
The restoration work was expert and extensive. And now, according to Andrzej, the damage from pollution had been reduced because the Nowa Huta steelworks had not only dropped production but adopted more environmentally sound processes.
We walked back to the Market Square. Every great city has at least one thing that lifts you out of the mundane: In San Francisco, it’s the cable cars; in London, the engulfing parks; in a New York City winter, the skaters at Rockefeller Center. Krakow has its square, said to be the largest in Europe, commodious enough to hold an enormous Cloth Hall, now an arcade of souvenir shops, in the middle.
Outdoor cafes had crept onto the square, tasteful pens of brand-name umbrellas corralled behind barricades of portable foliage. And some of the shops had changed.
“See the sign for Mustang Jeans?” he asked, “That used to be a wonderful old pharmacy. That corner,” he said, pointing down to Szewska Street, “is where McDonald’s wants to open a place. But there’s opposition.”
We walked past the flower vendors in kerchiefs, and the men turning kielbasa on a grill — the greasy aroma mingling earthily with that of manure from the horse-drawn carriages. A vintage blue tram car carried the name of a radio station — “They broadcast programs from there” — and a few steps away stood an old water pump.
“It looks like a normal water pump,” said Andrzej. “But on a spring day in 1980, a young man set himself on fire there to protest the lack of information about Katyn.”
Katyn is the place in Russia where, in 1940, more than 8,000 Poles were murdered, many of them officers, the hope of the next generation. When their graves were discovered, the Soviet Union, which had signed a non-aggression pact with Poland, attributed the crime to the Nazis.
“So it’s not,” said Andrzej, “a normal water pump.”
One day I was writing notes on a bench in the square when two young women sat down beside me. Their names were Beata and Dagmara; they were students in physical education; they wore brief camisoles and tight shorts that revealed hard-earned tans. They had come in early that morning from one of the surrounding towns and landed summer jobs as waitresses. They were to start tomorrow. I gave them a quick oral final in cafe English.
“Piwo?”
“Ah a beer.”
“Woda mineralna.”
“Water?”
“What kind?”
“Mineralna.”
“Sok pomaranczowy.”
“I don’t know,” they said
“Orange juice.”
They asked where I was from, then pined in unison.
“I wish I were in America,” said Dagmara. “It’s no good here.”
They were too young to appreciate all that had happened, the fact that they were the first generation in decades to grow up in a free Poland. A free Poland was almost all they had known. Even the city escaped them; this endlessly detailed medieval square was just a place to hang. They were a universal type: bored teens trapped in the belief that life is happening wherever they’re not. Which, in its way, was another sign of progress.
“Salaries are very low,” complained Beata. “We’ll make 500 zloty [$125] a month. The rest is tips, sometimes you make 60 zloty a day from tips.”
I suggested, as a kind of consolation, that at least people were pleasant.
“They’re not,” said Dagmara. “They’re only looking out for themselves.”
It was the same refrain I’d heard in Warsaw, that people were taking to capitalism with a vengeance. After hearing her out, I got up to go.
“I’ll give you two words you’ll need to know for your American customers,” I said. “With ice.”
Andrzej took me to lunch at U Stasi (Chez Stan), down a small street that led off from the square. It was a single room at the back of an asphalt courtyard; strangers squeezed next to strangers at communal tables, and perspiring waitresses muscled their way through with steaming plates. We ordered pierogies — potato and cheese for me, blueberries with sugar and sour cream for Andrzej — and then heard from our neighbor, a violinist, the latest gossip from the music academy. It seemed a very Krakovian method of news gathering.
Finished, we took a stroll in the direction of Kazimierz and entered the grounds of the Church on the Rock. It sat with its Pauline monastery in a walled oasis of grass and flowers. At one side of the garden a tall, thin, dark wood cross rose up with a small, dwarfed figure of Christ in the middle. It looked incongruous, homemade.
“The pope met here with young people on his first visit back to Poland,” Andrzej said, and, walking closer, I saw the date inscribed: “8 June 1979.” “Some students made this cross and brought it to the meeting. Afterwards, they didn’t know what to do with it, so the church allowed them to put it here.
“There was a change in Poland after that visit,” Andrzej said thoughtfully. “The Holy Father woke up something inside people. It didn’t matter if you were a believer or an atheist, everyone was affected.” I would never have suspected this tranquil cloister garden as being the site of one of the seminal moments in the gradual dismantling of the Iron Curtain.
We headed back to the center, taking the pastoral route along the Vistula River. Sunbathers dotted the banks, and the walls of Wawel Castle rose up imposingly. Andrzej suggested, before heading back to the office, a drink at Jama Michalika.
We sat in two absurdly high-backed chairs, under a stained glass window of Art Nouveau design. The walls dripped with paintings, sketches, caricatures, some of which were done, it is said, as payment for outstanding bills. Here, the Green Balloon cabaret had had its home, and even now the place looked less like a cafe than a museum of fin-de-siecle ardor and wit.
Sipping my beer, I mentioned to Andrzej what Dagmara had said about the reigning mood of selfishness. “Yes, yes,” he said, with the gentle weariness of a patient professor who has heard it all before. “But you see, Tom, in some ways it’s good. It shows initiative. For years people didn’t do anything because there was no incentive. They moaned and complained and felt totally helpless. Now they’re learning to take personal responsibility for their fates, to make something of themselves.”
Two days earlier in Kazimierz, I had spoken with Rafael Scharf, a wonderful writer who left Krakow before the war and was back in town for the Jewish Culture Festival. He had recently met, here at Jama Michalika, with the famously morose playwright Slawomir Mrozek. The conversation had plodded along until Scharf asked him: “Are there any reasons to be happy?”
And Mrozek, stirring, came up with three. One, the beautiful Polish youth. You sit in the Market Square, he said, and you see a parade of healthy, radiant, well-dressed young people. Two, an excellent press — newspapers that were on a par with the best in Europe. And three, for the first time in a long, long time, Poland was not threatened by any foreign powers.
We got up to go. I left a generous tip.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
LOT Polish Airlines has direct flights to Krakow from Chicago (non-stop to Warsaw). There are also 15 trains daily from Warsaw, 10 of which are express and take 2 hours.
LODGING
Two centrally located upscale options are Hotel Francuski (Pijarska 13, 31-015 Krakow; phone 011-48-12-422-5122; fax 011-48-12-422-5270; doubles starting at about $155) and Hotel Pod Roza (Florianska 14, 31-021 Krakow; phone 011-48-12-422-1244, fax 011-48-12-421-7513; doubles starting at $105).
Slightly cheaper, and also wonderfully situated, is the Hotel Saski (Slawkowska 3, 31-014 Krakow, phone 011-48-12-421-4222; fax 011-48-12-421-4830; doubles starting at about $68. Not all rooms come with private baths).
DINING
Polish delicacies include excellent soups (including borscht, served cold in summer with lots of dill), sausages, pierogies, wild mushrooms and vodkas. For hundreds of years, visiting dignitaries have dined in the candlelit rooms of Wierzynek on the Market Square. For something more plebeian, there’s Chlopskie Jadlo (Peasant Fare), Grodzka 9, where you’ll get complimentary bread spread with lard. For a change from Polish, there’s the excellent Corsican restaurant Paese at Poselska 24.
SIGHTS
Wawel Hill, with its cathedral and castle (known as Poland’s Acropolis); churches too numerous to mention (though the Mariacki Church on the Market Square is a must, especially for its altar, through don’t forget to look up at the ceiling); Jagiellonian University; the Market Square (you somehow always end up here); Kazimierz (Szeroka Street, with its atmospheric cafes; Tempel Synagogue; Remuh Synagogue with its adjoining cemetery, the Center for Jewish Culture); Jama Michalika Cafe.
CAVEATS
As in the rest of Poland, there has been an increase in crime, with tourists becoming popular targets (especially at train stations, where a group working in sync will crowd around unsuspecting passengers as they’re boarding and deftly relieve them of their wallets). Try not to stand out, be sensible, keep alert, and you should be able to enjoy the much more prevalent Polish hospitality. Krakow is enough removed from the main tourist track that visitors still tend to be treated not as customers but as guests.
INFORMATION
Contact the Polish National Tourist Office, 275 Madison Ave., Suite 1711, New York, NY 10016; phone 212-338-9412; www.polandtour.org/.
