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SZYDLOWIEC |
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Forty-five kilometres north of Kielce, SZYDLOWIEC is exactly the
kind of dusty Stare Miasto most people whizz through on the way to and
from Kraków, but there's enough worth seeing in its small, but
nonetheless enjoyable, set of historical monuments to justify a brief
stopover.
A placid central Rynek provides the focal point of the town, dominated
by a fine town hall , substantially renovated since the late 1980s, a
robust early-seventeenth-century construction topped with a high tower,
the attic's arcaded decorative frieze emphasizing the influence of
Kraków's Sukiennice on the style of construction. There's a pleasant
café in the cellars underneath the building that also holds occasional
concerts and other cultural events. Off the southern side of the Rynek
stands the late-Gothic Kosciól sw. Zygmunta (Church of St Sigismund),
with accompanying belfry, completed in the early 1500s, and mercifully
spared the usual later Baroque accretions. Notable features of the
largely well-preserved original interior include the sumptuous
early-seventeenth-century high altar , a fine carved Coronation of the
Virgin from 1531 and, most striking of all, the late-Gothic polyptych
housed in the presbytery. Produced by one of the prolific Kraków
workshops of the period, the central panel illustrates the Assumption of
the Virgin, with the twelve Apostles gathered round the empty tomb of
the resurrected Christ. Below them kneel the figures of the Szydlowiec
family, the town founders and financial patrons of the church. Mikolaj
Szydlowiecki, royal chancellor until his death in 1532, is commemorated
in a fine marble tablet executed by Bartolomeo Berecci of Wawel
cathedral fame.
Half a kilometre west of the Rynek is the town castle , a dilapidated
old pile surrounded by a stagnant moat, built for Chancellor
Szydlowiecki in the 1510s, overhauled a century later and, by the look
of things, allowed to sink gracefully into decline ever since. Much of
the castle is closed to visitors, the major exceptions being the cobbled
inner courtyard and a Muzeum Ludowych Instrumentów Muzycznych (Museum of
Folk Instruments; Tues-Fri 9am-3.30pm, Sat 10am-5.30pm; entrance from
the south side of the building; 3zl), which houses an enjoyable
selection of musical accoutrements ranging from fiddles, accordions,
hurdy-gurdys and bagpipes to more exotic creations such as animal-shaped
whistles and percussion instruments of all shapes and sizes.
Jews formed a sizeable percentage of the town population up until the
liquidation of the Nazi-established ghetto here in January 1943, when
they were deported en masse to Treblinka. Echoes of their presence
revolve around the former synagogue , now a library, on ul. Grabarskiej,
near the old Jewish-run brewery on ul. Sowinskiego, and most powerfully
of all in the cemetery , out at the end of ul. Wschodnia, on the edge of
town near the Radom road. One of the largest and most impressive such
sites left in Poland, a walk through the walled, overgrown burial
ground, where over 3000 tombstones are still standing, the oldest dating
back to the late eighteenth century, uncovers numerous examples of the
elaborately carved floral and symbolic motifs typical of Jewish matzevot
in Poland and elsewhere in east-central Europe. A memorial near the main
cemetery gate commemorates the 16,000 Jews deported from the town in
1943.
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