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KRAKÓW |
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KRAKÓW , the ancient capital of Poland and residence for centuries
of its kings, was the only major city in the country to come through
World War II essentially undamaged. Its assembly of monuments, without
rival in Poland, is listed by UNESCO as one of the world's twelve most
significant historic sites. The city is indeed a visual treat, with the
Wawel being one of the most striking royal residences in Europe, and the
old inner town a mass of flamboyant monuments. For Poles, these are a
symbolic representation of the nation's historical continuity, and for
visitors brought up on grey Cold War images of Eastern Europe they are a
revelation. All the more ironic, then, that the government of the 1970s
had to add a further tag, that of official "ecological disaster area" -
for Kraków's industrial suburbs represent the communist experiment at
its saddest extreme.
Until the war, the city revolved around its Jagiellonian University ,
founded back in the fourteenth century, and its civic power was centred
on the university's Catholic, conservative intelligentsia. The communist
regime, wishing to break their hold, decided to graft a new working
class onto the city by developing one of the largest steelworks in
Europe, Nowa Huta , on the outskirts. Within a few decades its effects
were apparent as the city fabric began to crumble. Consequently, in
recent times, Kraków has been faced with intractable economic and
environmental problems: how to deal with the acid rain of the steelworks,
how to renovate the monuments, how to maintain jobs. Throughout the
1990s steady progress was made on environmental issues, and local
initiatives in pollution reduction - combined with Western funding -
mean that Kraków is now cleaner than it has been for decades, recent
figures suggesting that air pollution levels are seventy percent below
those of the mid-1980s.
Nowa Huta has played a significant role in Poland's recent political
history . It was here - along with the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk - that
things started to fall apart for the communist government. By the 1970s,
the steelworkers had become the epitome of hostility to the state, and
with the birth of Solidarity in 1980, Nowa Huta emerged as a centre of
trade union agitation. Working-class unity with the city's Catholic
elite was demonstrated by Solidarity's call to increase the officially
restricted circulation of Tygodnik Powszechny , a Kraków Catholic weekly
which was then the only independent newspaper in Eastern Europe. It was
in Kraków, as much as anywhere in the country, that the new order was
created, and today, it is in Kraków that the economic fruits of that
order are most visible.
The city
The heart of the city centre is the Stare Miasto , the Old Town,
bordered by the lush, tree-shaded city park known as the Planty . The
Rynek Glówny is the focal point, with almost everything within half an
hour's walk of it. A broad network of streets stretches south from here
to the edge of Wawel Hill , with its royal residence, and beyond to the
Jewish quarter of Kazimierz . Across the river, on the edge of the
Podgórze suburb, is the old wartime ghetto. And finally, a little
further out to the west, Kopiec Kosciuszki (Kosciuszko's Mound) offers
an attractive stretch of woods and countryside, just a ten-minute bus
ride from the centre.
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