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  • Day 523

    Day 524: Old Town of Zamosc

    July 23, 2018 in Poland ⋅ ☁️ 24 °C

    Left Bialowieza forest behind in the morning and drove about 4 hours south to the small city of Zamosc. This is a small 16th-century trading city, especially by a local nobleman specifically for that purpose. He saw that his lands were in a good spot for trading between western Europe, the Baltics and the Black Sea, so he built a city for trading. To attract merchants and citizens, he promoted low taxes and tolerant religious policies so that all types of Christians, Jews and Muslims all came and left their mark.

    An exciting moment too - this is World Heritage site number 350 for me! Always nice to crack a milestone, even if it's only 32% of the total (our completion percentage dropped a bit as 19 new sites were added at the UNESCO conference a few weeks earlier).

    We had a nice few hours wandering around checking out things, particularly the Armenian merchant townhouses dating from the 17th century. Everything was in great condition as this was one of the places in Poland that didn't get heavily bombed during WW2, even though there was a Gestapo camp just outside of town where around 20,000 people were shot to death.

    Late afternoon we headed to our Airbnb which was a little odd - we were basically staying in the spare room of a family's farmhouse. Only the kids spoke English, but the daughter wasn't around (it was her room we were staying in I think), and the teenage son was constantly busy with chores. So we just stayed in our room.

    A huge storm blew through in the early evening and we weren't sure what to do for dinner since Schnitzel is terrified of storms, but eventually it puffed out and we headed back into town for dinner. Settled on an Armenian restaurant because of the Armenian townhouses! We both had a mixed grill type plate with charcoal grilled vegetables, spit kebab and some dips. Very similar to a kebab place that you'd get at a Turkish restaurant.
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