Krakow Without the Main Square: Nowa Huta, Kazimierz and Podgorze
The Main Square was already saturated by nine on our first morning. Horse carriages queued along one side, a man in a dragon suit posed for photographs near the cloth hall, and three separate walking tours converged under the same tower while their guides raised competing umbrellas. We had done all of this properly on an earlier trip. It was lovely then. It was not what we had come back for.
So we gave ourselves two days and three districts: Nowa Huta out to the east, Kazimierz just south of the old walls, and Podgorze on the far bank of the Vistula. We walked most of it and took trams for the rest. What follows is what we actually saw, including the parts where we were bored, and the parts where we found ourselves standing still without much to say.
Nowa Huta: a city built to argue with another one
Nowa Huta was founded in 1949 as a new industrial settlement beside Krakow, and absorbed into the city two years later. The steelworks opened in 1954 as the Lenin Steelworks, grew into the largest mill in Poland within two decades, and now carries the name of the metallurgist Tadeusz Sendzimir under foreign ownership. The intent behind it was not subtle. Krakow was a university city with a cathedral and a royal castle and an awkward relationship with the new order. Nowa Huta was to be its opposite number: workers, furnaces, and a plan.
We took a tram east from the centre. It took about half an hour, and the ride itself was the first useful thing. You watch the tenements give way to postwar blocks, then to greener, looser ground, and by the time the tram swings into Plac Centralny you understand that this is a separate place that happens to share a ticketing system.
The square is the hinge of the whole design. Avenues run out from it at fixed angles, framed by long arcaded blocks in the heavy classical style that Polish planners were required to use in the first half of the 1950s. It is genuinely impressive in the way a drawing is impressive. It is also, at eleven on a Tuesday morning, almost empty. We stood there for a while feeling nothing in particular. I will be honest: the first twenty minutes in Nowa Huta were dull. There is no obvious thing to look at, no facade you are meant to photograph, and the scale defeats the camera anyway.
The quiet we did not expect
What turned it around was leaving the avenue. The blocks are built around courtyards, and the courtyards are full of mature trees, benches, playgrounds and a great deal of grass. Nowa Huta is often described as the greenest part of Krakow, and walking through it we could believe it. There were prams, dogs, three men repairing a bicycle, a woman carrying shopping across a lawn that in most cities would be a car park. Traffic noise dropped to nothing about forty metres in from the main road. We spent an hour drifting between courtyards without a destination, which is not something the Old Town permits.
The other thing worth walking to is the Arka Pana church, built between 1969 and 1977 and consecrated by Karol Wojtyla shortly before he became pope. It was raised after years of pressure from residents in a district that had been planned without a church at all, and the shape is meant to read as an ark: a hull, a prow, a roof that seems to be pitching forward. Inside it is dim and rough and much stranger than the exterior suggests. We were the only visitors.
Tourism here is real but thin. We saw two small groups near Plac Centralny and a vintage car waiting for a booked tour, and that was the whole of it.
This is also where the practical shape of a Krakow trip becomes obvious. The airport sits about eleven kilometres west of the centre, with a train that reaches the main station in under twenty minutes but takes you no closer to any of the three districts we cared about; from there it is another tram, and the distances between Nowa Huta, Kazimierz and Podgorze are real distances, not strolls. We are usually the sort of travellers who improvise, and we still found that sorting out transport in Krakow before we arrived saved us the two hours of standing in the wrong queue with luggage that ordinarily opens a trip. Once inside the city, trams did everything else we needed.
Kazimierz: layers that refuse to sit neatly
Kazimierz is a twenty-minute walk from the Main Square, or four minutes on any of several trams down Starowislna. It was a separate town for centuries before it became a district, and from the late medieval period it held Krakow's Jewish community. That history survives in an unusual concentration of buildings within a few hundred metres.
On Szeroka Street alone you have the Old Synagogue, dating to the early fifteenth century and now a museum of Jewish history, and the Remuh synagogue of 1556, which is one of the few in the city still used for prayer, with its old cemetery behind. Walk two streets over and there is the High Synagogue on Jozefa, the Izaak synagogue on Kupa Street from the 1640s, the Kupa synagogue on Miodowa, and the Tempel, built in the 1860s in a style borrowed from Vienna. The Popper synagogue is now a bookshop. That one stayed with us longer than the museums did, partly because nobody announces it, and partly because a room full of paperbacks is a strange and quite gentle afterlife for a building like that.
Szeroka itself we found difficult. It is ringed with restaurant terraces, several of them playing amplified klezmer at lunchtime, and the effect is of a set dressed to look like the thing that used to stand there. We ate elsewhere. Others will feel differently. We could not get past it.
Plac Nowy at eleven at night
Two streets west, Plac Nowy is the centre of Kazimierz as it currently functions. The round brick building in the middle went up in 1900 as a kosher poultry slaughterhouse and served that purpose until the German occupation. It now has hatches cut into its sides, and those hatches sell zapiekanki: a long half-baguette loaded with mushrooms, cheese and whatever else, grilled and cut into pieces and handed over in cardboard. They run very late. We ate ours standing up at half past eleven with beer from a bar across the square, surrounded by students and a group of men in football shirts, and it was one of the better meals of the trip in every sense except nutritionally.
By day the square is a market. Stalls sell vegetables and cheap clothes on ordinary mornings, antiques on Saturdays, second-hand clothing on Sundays. We went back on a Saturday morning to a completely different place: older, slower, mostly local, with the bar tables stacked and hosed down.
Kazimierz is heavily touristed and there is no honest way to describe it otherwise. But the pressure is concentrated. Szeroka and Plac Nowy carry almost all of it, and the streets behind them, Jozefa and Meiselsa and the courtyards off them, were quiet enough on a weekday afternoon that we could hear our own footsteps.
Podgorze: over the bridge, and heavier
Podgorze is across the Vistula, reachable by footbridge in a few minutes. The change is immediate and physical. The noise drops, the streets straighten, and the buildings are plainer.
The centre of it, for most visitors, is Plac Bohaterow Getta, Ghetto Heroes Square. It was called Plac Zgody before the war. During the occupation the ghetto was established in these streets, and this square became the assembly point from which people were deported. In 2005 it was redesigned by the architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak, and the design is a field of empty chairs in bronze and iron, spaced on a grid across the paving, each raised slightly off the ground. They refer to the furniture left behind in the square during the deportations. Trams still stop here. People sit on the chairs, wait, check their phones, and get on the tram, which is unsettling for about a minute and then feels correct. Under the arcade on one side is the pharmacy that operated inside the ghetto, now a small museum.
A short walk away, at Lipowa 4, is Oskar Schindler's former enamel factory, a museum since 2010. It is worth saying clearly what it is, because we arrived expecting something else: the permanent exhibition covers Krakow under German occupation between 1939 and 1945, the city and its people, and Schindler's own story arrives late and briefly. The reconstruction of his office is near the end. We failed to get in on our first attempt because the timed tickets had gone, went back the following morning having booked, and needed about two and a half hours. It is a dense, dark, well-made exhibition and we came out of it not wanting to talk.
Which is partly why we then walked up the Krakus Mound. It sits on Lasota Hill, sixteen metres of earth on a sixty-metre base, and nobody is certain who built it or when. Excavations in the 1930s found a wooden core and objects from roughly the eighth to tenth centuries; some researchers have argued for a much older origin. The path up takes five minutes. From the top you get the whole city on one side, the quarry and the industrial edge on the other, and a lot of wind. A spring festival called Rekawka was held on its slopes for centuries, lapsed, and has been revived in recent decades.
Two Districts, One Afternoon
If we did it again, we would keep the pairing that worked by accident. Kazimierz in the morning and Podgorze in the afternoon make one continuous walk joined by a single bridge, and the shift in weight between them is the point: from a district that has been noisily reoccupied by bars and bookshops to one where the same history sits in near silence on the other bank. Doing them on separate days would break something.
Nowa Huta needs its own day, and needs you to accept that the first half hour will feel like nothing is happening. It is not a museum of communism, whatever the tours imply. It is a residential district where people live ordinary lives among monumental plans that were never finished, and the interesting part is the gap between those two facts.
We skipped plenty. We never got to the mound at Wanda, never went inside the Tempel, and left Podgorze's riverside without walking as far as the old camp site at Plaszow, which we knew was a decision made out of tiredness rather than judgement. On the last evening we came back through the Main Square on the way to dinner. It was still full, still floodlit, still very beautiful. It just no longer felt like the whole of the city, which is the only thing we had really wanted from the trip.
Before We Left
Krakow does not become less interesting when you leave the Main Square behind. It becomes harder to summarise. Nowa Huta is wide, quiet and stubbornly ordinary. Kazimierz is crowded in places, commercialised in others, but still full of buildings that carry histories far older than the restaurants beneath them. Across the river, Podgorze asks for a different kind of attention altogether.
We came back to the centre on our final evening and found exactly the Krakow we had remembered: beautiful, busy and polished. But after two days of trams, courtyards, synagogues, empty chairs and long walks beside the Vistula, it felt like one district among many rather than the city itself.
That turned out to be the better way to leave Krakow: not by avoiding its famous centre, but by finally understanding that it was only the beginning.