01.08.2011 – 01.08.2011  21 °C

Had a plan this morning to catch the free tour of the Old Town at 11am so I arrived in plenty of time to catch the tour. There were more than 70 people wanting to take the tour so after 2 blocks I decided to ditch the “free” tour and actually find one that I would pay for and should be a lot more intimate. Went hunting and the next avail tour wasn’t til 2.30pm so I booked myself in and then thought to myself “what am I going to do for the next few hours whilst I wait?” I had by this time seen a lot of the Old Town myself and thought it would be about time that I took some retail therapy and headed to the shopping mall that I hauled my suit case through only a few days prior.

My gosh, I love Poland for its prices!! It must be one of the cheapest countries to buy stuff in the whole of Europe.. Cheap, cheap. Considering how dead many of my t-shirts were becoming I thought I’d spend a total of 25 dollars and buy three new ones! CHEAP!

By this time it was nearly 2.30 so I went back to the digs to dump my new purchases and headed to the meeting place for the walking tour of the Old Town (which only cost me 10 dollars anyhow!)

The first thing I need to tell you about the Old Town is the clock tower. Every hour it chimes out the time (7 bongs for 7 o’clock that sort of thing). At the end of the “bongs” you get this bugle noise that goes for probably about 30 sec. No kidding, every hour of every day there is a bugle player who stands on the top of the church in the town square and plays this tune. Apparently it has been played for hundreds of years and is played to commemorate some guard who was watching the town back in the time of the Mongol invasion. He played to warn the citizens of the impending attack and was shot by an arrow in the neck during his tune. For this reason the bugle is sounded every hour in commemoration. Not that I would know, but it is even played at 3am in the morning… one thing for Krakow is that you always know what time it is by the bong-ing of the clock tower and tehn the bugleing!

We started our tour hearing about the clock tower and seeing the old foundations of the market square. The Old Town has been in its current location for near on a thousand years, and over this time the actually height of the market square has risen about 2m. This is because, back in the day, there was no garbage disposal so over the years there have been many layers of accumulated rubbish which has slowly raised the floor of the market square!

Our tour lead us down the “Royal Way” ending at Wavell Castle. We stopped on the way at a tenth century (Roman-esq) abbey, which was interesting in the fact that you could see the different styles of architecture. One of the ways to differentiate the types of architecture in churches is to view the windows and stones. Roman architecture (to about the 1250s) is quite plain and the windows themselves are shaped like rectangles with half a circle plonked on top (standard “window” shape as per playschool). Gothic and Neo-Gothic (til 1500s) have pointed shaped windows… so still rectangle but with a half circle that has a pointed top on top. The stones are normally different too… Roman are just stones that are stuck together… From Gothic onwards the art of building bricks had started so the walls tend to be more uniform and are definite brick shapes.

We also took in the site of one of the oldest universities in the world before making our way down to Wavell Castle. Wavell was first built at the turn of the last century… the castle as we see today though was largely built in the 1500s and was the heridatory home of the Kings of Poland. The Polish people are quite proud of their heritage, at one time the kingdom of Poland ran from Lithuania in the North to the Czech Republic in the south. It was the second largest kingdom behind Russia (from a land mass point of view). The height of the Kingdom of Poland was from the mid 1500s til about 1700 when Poland was divided up by the Prussian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Kingdoms. Today you can still feel the majesty of the kingdom of Poland purely by looking at Wavell Hill (it’s definitely one of the more grandiose palaces I have seen yet). Of course the Royal Chapel houses the remains of many of the kings of Poland and definitely doesn’t lack for gold on the walls and ceilings!

Finished our tour with a cup of coffee and a chat. Really great afternoon of walking and talking Polish History.