Main Market Square, Kraków

Kraków's Rynek Główny is a medieval square on a grand scale: about 3.8 hectares of open paving, often counted among the largest town squares of medieval Europe. Its geometry is older than any building on it. After the Mongol raid of 1241 laid the town waste, Kraków was refounded under Magdeburg law in 1257 on a regular grid, and the square was drawn as its centre, with three streets leaving each side at right angles. That plan has survived nearly eight centuries almost untouched, so walking in from any of the side streets you still arrive exactly where the thirteenth-century surveyors meant you to.

The square is not an empty frame but a room full of furniture. Down the middle runs the Cloth Hall, the Sukiennice, a long Gothic market hall rebuilt in the Renaissance style in 1555, when it gained its crest of an arcaded attic parapet lined with carved grotesque masks. Beside it stands the lone Town Hall Tower, all that remains of the old town hall. In one corner, the small domed church of St Adalbert goes back to the eleventh century and is older than the square itself. And on the north-east side rise the two unequal towers of St Mary's Basilica, whose Gothic interior holds the carved wooden altarpiece of Veit Stoss, and from whose taller tower a trumpeter plays the hejnał every hour, breaking off mid-phrase in memory of a watchman said, in local legend, to have been cut down by an arrow.

Much of Polish history has been staged here. In 1525 Albert of Prussia knelt on the square to pay homage to King Sigismund I, and in 1794 Tadeusz Kościuszko proclaimed the national uprising from it. The bronze monument to the poet Adam Mickiewicz, unveiled in 1898, remains the city's favourite meeting point. The square became part of the Historic Centre of Kraków, among the very first sites on the World Heritage List in 1978. Beneath the paving, excavations from 2005 uncovered the foundations of medieval market stalls and workshops, and since 2010 they have been open as the Rynek Underground museum, so the square can now be read in two layers: its present life above and its first centuries below.

Getting there

The square is the heart of Kraków's Old Town, a few minutes' walk from the main railway station, Kraków Główny, through the Planty park ring. Kraków John Paul II International Airport (KRK) is about 11 km away, and a direct train links it with Kraków Główny in under twenty minutes. The Old Town around the square is largely pedestrianised, so it is best explored on foot.