Poland

Starting with the castle and cathedral, which was where Poland's kings and queens were crowned and buried, and as such seems be one of the places they take huge groups of schoolchildren to appreciate their heritage. So the queues to get in were huge and, as it's quite a small cathedral , inside it was completely rammed. You really couldn't see much through the crowds. You could also go down underneath the castle where excavations have revealed lower layers of buildings, including the base of an earlier church dating from 10th century, and as the school groups don't go down there it was quiet and peaceful, but sadly again even though there were cases of some of the artefacts found there showing life in medieval Kraków, there very few information points to tell you what you were seeing. From there to a nearby church in which is a 17th century painting by a krakowian monk that we had seen a copy of in Warsaw. Called the Dance of Death, it shows a ring of women from royalty to serfs dancing each with a skeleton, and round the outside panels of men from many professions, each also with a skeleton.

Then a little walk into the old Jewish quarter, which became the Kraków ghetto, and a visit to a couple of the remaining synagogues, an older and plainer one, with an old Jewish cemetery attached, and one dating from the late 1800s, much more fancy with lovely stained glass windows. Hard to tell though how much is original and how much reconstructed after the war, because the Germans demolished everything they could.Read more