Kraków

Kraków began as a fortified settlement of the Vistulans on Wawel Hill around the 8th century; legend credits its founding to Krakus, who built it above the cave of the Wawel dragon. First recorded in 965 as a trading centre, it was taken into the Piast realm by Mieszko I and became the seat of Polish monarchs in 1038. Sacked by the Mongols in 1241, it was rebuilt under Magdeburg law in 1257 with the grid and great square that still define it. Casimir the Great founded the neighbouring town of Kazimierz in 1335 and the university in 1364, and under the Jagiellonians Kraków was a Hanseatic trading city and a Renaissance capital; the first work printed in Poland appeared here in 1473.

In 1596 Sigismund III moved the capital to Warsaw, though kings were still crowned and buried on Wawel. Swedish pillage in the 1650s and a plague in 1707 that killed 20,000 weakened the city, and in 1794 Tadeusz Kościuszko launched his insurrection on the Main Square. After the Partitions it was a small free city and then part of Austrian Galicia, and by the early 20th century it had electric trams and had grown into Greater Kraków.

In the Second World War Hans Frank ruled the German General Government from Wawel. Of a population of about 250,000, some 56,000 were Jews; in March 1941 they were confined to a ghetto in Podgórze and later sent to Płaszów and the extermination camps. Soviet forces entered on 18 January 1945, and the communists built the steel town of Nowa Huta. In 1978 the historic centre was among the first sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List, the same year the city's archbishop became Pope John Paul II.

Kraków sees itself as Poland's cultural capital. The Jagiellonian University, one of the oldest in the world, keeps Copernicus's manuscript of De revolutionibus in its library; the Academy of Fine Arts is the oldest in Poland; and the city has the National Stary Theatre, the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, an opera and a philharmonic. Festivals run through the year, from the Baroque music of Misteria Paschalia and the contemporary Sacrum-Profanum to the Jewish Culture Festival in Kazimierz.

Old customs are kept with care. A trumpeter plays the hejnał from St Mary's tower every hour and stops mid-note; the Lajkonik, a rider dressed as a khan on a hobby horse, parades after Corpus Christi; and in December craftsmen compete with szopki, glittering nativity scenes built in the shape of Kraków's historic buildings. The city is more devout than most of Poland: in 2017 about half of Catholics in the archdiocese attended Mass weekly, against a national average of 38 per cent.

Jewish history is central to the city's sense of itself. Before the war Kraków had at least 90 synagogues and a community of 60,000–80,000; today Kazimierz's synagogues, cemeteries and festival keep that memory present. A Cracovian is known in Polish as a krakowianin or, informally, a krakus.

Kraków had a population of about 817,000 in 2025, with some 1.4 million in its metropolitan area, and it is growing: the figure was about 775,000 in 2019. The city is young, with around 60 per cent of residents under 45, and immigration has risen sharply — by 2019 foreigners were estimated at up to a tenth of the population.

Universities, the offices of some 50 large multinational companies and tourism are now mainstays of the economy. In 2019 the city counted more than 14 million visitors, 3.3 million of them from abroad.

Most people live outside the Old Town, in the 19th-century streets around it, in Podgórze and in the large estates of Nowa Huta and the northern districts, and travel by tram. Students set much of the rhythm, with cafés busy late and evenings spent in Kazimierz and along the river. Air quality has long been the city's great complaint: Kraków often had some of Europe's worst winter smog from coal heating, and from September 2019 solid fuels were banned in small heating installations in the city.

Kraków's street symbol is the obwarzanek krakowski, a braided ring of bread sprinkled with poppy or sesame seeds and sold from carts across the centre; it holds EU Protected Geographical Indication status, and the city also claims the bagel as its own invention. The zapiekanka, a long open-faced baguette toasted with mushrooms and cheese and served hot with ketchup, has been a Polish street food since the 1970s, and the stands in the round market hall on Plac Nowy in Kazimierz have a cult following.

Milk bars, the bar mleczny cafeterias of communist times, still serve simple Polish meals at very low prices and sell no alcohol. Kazimierz's restaurants range from Jewish-themed places around Szeroka Street to the bars that fill the streets around Plac Nowy, and the Old Town's restaurants spread out from the Main Square into its side streets.

From the highlands to the south comes oscypek, a smoked cheese of salted sheep's milk made only in the Tatra Mountains region. Wadowice, John Paul II's home town, is known for the kremówka, a cream cake he recalled eating there with friends after his final school exams.