St. Mary's Basilica, Kraków

Two unequal brick towers rise over the corner of Kraków's Main Market Square, and every hour a trumpeter in the taller one plays a short signal that breaks off in mid-phrase. St Mary's Church — formally the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary — is one of the finest examples of Polish brick Gothic, and inside it stands one of the greatest works of late medieval sculpture in Europe. Kraków itself, Poland's royal capital for centuries, kept its medieval street plan around the vast market square, and its historic centre was among the first sites placed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1978.

A church stood here by the 1220s; it was destroyed during the Mongol invasion, and a new early Gothic building rose on its foundations around 1290–1300. Under King Casimir the Great, with money from the wealthy burgher Mikołaj Wierzynek, it was rebuilt between 1355 and 1365 with a lengthened chancel and tall windows, and the nave was vaulted in the 1390s by Nicholas Wernher of Prague. The northern tower, about 80 metres high, served as the city's watchtower; its spire dates from 1478 and the gilded crown on top from 1666. Local tradition holds that the interrupted trumpet call recalls a watchman shot in the throat while warning of a Mongol attack, though the story's first known telling is a 1928 American novel.

The high altar is the masterpiece. Carved between 1477 and 1489 by the German-born sculptor Veit Stoss, who worked in Kraków for over twenty years, the polyptych is about 13 metres high and 11 metres wide when open. Its central scene, the Dormition of the Virgin among the apostles, uses figures some 2.7 metres tall, each cut from a single lime-tree trunk. In 1941 the occupying Germans shipped the altarpiece to the Reich; it was found in 1946 in the cellars of Nuremberg Castle and returned to the church in 1957. The interior polychromy, designed by Jan Matejko in the 1890s with stained glass by Stanisław Wyspiański and Józef Mehoffer, wraps the Gothic space in deep blues and golds.

Getting there

The church stands on Mariacki Square at the northeast corner of the Main Market Square in central Kraków, less than a kilometre from Kraków Główny railway station. Kraków John Paul II International Airport (KRK) lies about 11 km to the west.