Introduction to Krakow, Poland Kraków

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.

Information by Rough Guides

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