It’s only coming back to this for travelblogging purposes that I realised what an eerie retread of my movements on May 8th 2018 it was – exactly four years and one day later. But, and here’s the critical difference, the panorama was open.

May 9th is Victory Day in Russia and the old Soviet Union (Poland officially changed their observance to the Western VE day, 8 May, in the mid-2010s), the day a lot of slightly-below-top-tier military commentators were worried that Putin was going to declare unlimited war in Ukraine. So it was in an appropriate spirit of feverish Russophobia that we went to the Racławice Panorama. As a sort of nationalistic mass-market populist war-glorification, the closest modern analogue to a 19th century panorama is probably a really nationalistic history-lite blockbuster war film, and the bogglingly huge canvas is, in its own way,  as technically and visually impressive. We accidentally timed it perfectly, getting a slot just before a huge noisy school group, and got the rotunda half to ourselves. It evokes, as much as is possible in 1700 square metres of canvas, a blazing, blood-slick day viewed from the heart of a colossal mess, cleverly throwing in some props and ground detail in the foreground (as the 1453 panorama in Istanbul did) to make it all feel much more tangible. An audio guide points out the salient details: Kościuszko with his little upturned nose visible urging on a crowd of patriotic peasants as they charge at Russian artillery batteries with modified scythes, the caricature-Asiatic faces of Cossacks as they turn to spear a proud moustachioed Polish cavalryman, a tableau of a peasant woman kneeling by her shot husband and blasted cottage, peasant-soldiers in a nearby column struck by horror and regret but sternly pressing on with their duty. It’s incredible propaganda. Poland won the battle of Racławice, but the uprising failed and the country was brutally partitioned (again) and disappeared from the map for over a century. But that just makes it an even more excellent piece of propaganda; in the business of myth-making, victory is nothing compared to martyrdom.

We returned along the lovely waterfront, enjoying a few Wroclaw-specific delights: a chap dressed as a monk who was probably actually a monk, the incredible Max Berg market hall filled with the smell of flowers and the sound of sparrows; the fun old hydropower plant (also a Max Berg) and a weirdly enormous chair.

Gosia arrived on the red-eye from Lublin and we had a vegan lunch out of the aching sun of the town square, chilled in our Airbnb a spell and then went up the tower of the Garrison Church – the church itself was closed for cleaning four years ago, and still was today. How long does it take? The green bridge to Ostrow Tumski has been cleared of those obnoxious love-locks and sports an explanatory plaque and a new padlock gnome. Animated by a weird nostalgia, we explored the churches, and went on a turn around the delights of the Centennial Hall and the Japanese garden which, yes, deja vu.

YES. GOOD.

On Wednesday, we left our bags at a hotel near the station and headed back into town for breakfast, turning down the Selfie Café for the longer menus and less obnoxious meme-ness of its next-door neighbour. Nearby, the magnificent university building (built originally for Jesuits – a promising indicator of the kind of bling meant to overawe the soul and burn out the optic nerve) promised limitless wonders, including some of the grandest baroque interiors in Poland and objects collected over three centuries as a seat of learning and intellect. Unfortunately, this would have to wait for another visit (probably around May 8-9), as unlike all the other museums the university museum is closed on a Wednesday.

So on to the military museum, which was just as good as last time, and the archaeological museum, home to some very striking bits (a reconstructed bloomery, a nest of bronze sickles, some really stunning axeheads) in among the usual collection of fairly anonymous bones, rocks and pot shards (which could have had better English signage – thank goodness for Gosia). In search of a late lunch, we stopped at the first open place, which turned out to be  “El Cubano”, and was incredibly good. And then – shocker – the Garrison Church was actually open, and we could visit! Even better, we learned that the church very recently had its magnificent 18th century organ (a lucky survivor of the war destroyed in a fire in the 1970s. Better still, a skilled organist was putting the glorious thing through its paces.

The church is home to an astonishing set of commemorative masterpieces: plenty of Renaissance gold-and-alabaster memorials have somehow survived, but the stained glass is all postwar, and exquisitely expresses all the shades and colours of modern pain. A very Polish sense of remembrance was in evidence, sorrow leavened with bitterness, and an instruction to future generations: do not forget what was done to us. The anchor of the Armia Krajowa, a Katyn memorial, a chapel to Rafał Kalinowski, the patron saint of three centuries of Poles deported to labour camps in Siberia.

Out in the blinding contrast of the sunlight again, perhaps we could finally see the Ratusz? No – a sign at the door saying “sorry, ratusz closed”, and fluent English bemusement at the nearby tourist office (“it should be open today. I wonder why it isn’t?”) We were directed instead to the city museum, and warned by the that it would be something of a hurry in our available hour. I could have spent five hours there but one was still a wondrous experience, opening very strong with a giant, upsettingly pornographic meditation on Soviet trauma by Franciszek Starowieyski.

Going through the city, it struck me how completely and comfortably Polish Wrocław appears to have settled on the bones of German Breslau, and (in significant contrast to both Krakow and Gdansk) how little of the city’s very German – but also very lovely – 19th and early 20th century architectural heritage has been vandalised or replaced. The museum, likewise, was very comfortable with the city’s fascinatingly polyglot and many-mastered history: big-chinned Habsburgs and severe Prussians share wall space easily with Kosciuszko. As we get into the late nineteenth century, past demented wizard-staff-esque faculty sceptres and the woodblock prints of the university, the city’s industrial and intellectual pride are fully on display; pre-war Breslau exemplified a dynamic, diverse, prosperous central Europe of dozens of good-sized cities connected with each other, each doing its own thing just a little bit better than anywhere else in the world, until that world was annihilated for no reason by the Great War. Breslau as an entity staggers on for a bit in its artefacts (a replica of one of the famous Linke-Hofmann-Werke tram factory’s products, a photo of a Zeppelin over the centennial hall) but with the inevitable looming hideousness as you approach the 1940s in any museum on mainland Europe. In one case, a photo of a magnificent belle-epoque synagogue; in the next, the hazy outline of its burning dome, the morning after Kristallnacht.

Poland 2022
The Lost Wawel – Barbican, Celestat, Auschwitz – From Wieliczka to Wrocław – Racławice, Ostrow Tumski, Museums of Wrocław – Książ Castle – Gdansk town hall, Westerplatte – Malbork

After Auschwitz, we returned to Krakow (the evening bus would have taken hours upon hours, so we took a taxi, which gouged us horrendously) and walked Kazimierz, the old Jewish district, then blotted out all ability to feel with a huge Georgian dinner complete with a carafe of the house Saperavi. We rose early the next day, and the 304 bus whisked us to Krakow’s other favourite out-of-town ttraction, the Wieliczka salt mines.

The experience was quite unlike the other Habsburgesque salt mine experience I’ve had, Turda. Wieliczka has been a tourist attraction since Copernicus (represented in a stylised carving from two huge blocks of salt) visited, and the atmosphere is quite different: past the initial hundred metres of descent, everything is so well-paved and decently-lit that at times you could be in any heritage centre, except every so often you glance down a side shaft and see rusty little railways running down a brine-streaked passage half a kilometre long. The tour gradually amps up the grandeur, starting with medium-sized chambers featuring the usual (slightly salty) mannequins and miniatures of minework life, working up through winding passages to the odd vast barely-lit cave, and culminating in a series of incredible cathedral-like spaces, thousands of trees’ worth of beams supporting each other in bizarre sunken megastructures. There’s even a break point where you can stave off dehydration at a café and peruse a gift shop filled with exciting salt-themed souvenirs, before you move on to a literally cathedral-like space lit by (salt crystal) chandeliers, with (salt) carvings directly into the (salt) walls showing scenes from the life of (salt) Christ, and a big freestanding Jan Pawel (sculpted, shockingly, from salt).

In the final stage, past the second gift shop (in case you regretted not buying any salt the first time) there was meant to be a museum of mine equipment, but the attendant with their salt-pick-buttoned tunic told us we would have to wait an hour, and so we headed back through another 800m of tunnels to a lift. Above ground was a third gift shop with the exact same salty souvenirs. Somehow, we resisted.

The bus (its info screen striped blue and yellow, with Ukrainian translations of important words) took us back to Krakow where we almost immediately bumped into two older men in incredible gold-embroidered red velvet outfits, including capes, one also wearing a crown and carefully carrying a huge two-handed sword by the blade. As we jostled past a seemingly endless stream of religious banners, nuns and little old ladies in peasant costume carrying burnished holy icons, some hurried googling indicated that this was in fact the Procession of St Stanisław. The Fowler King brushed past, complete with silver cock.

Somewhat dazed by the bright light and the sight of a troupe of Polish morris dancers (?!) we found a lovely indie pizza place – quite a Bristol feeling – in Kazimierz and recharged us ahead of the Remu synagogue. We paid our zlotys, put on the skullcaps offered, and got the wonderful feeling common to eastern European synagogues of an artistic and symbolic tradition at least as venerable and ornate as any Christian church, using the same materials and technical techniques but a completely different set of iconography and symbolic building-blocks. In the graveyard, with pebbles set on the metal rain-roofs of its curious-looking gravestones, a bearded man in a white shirtwaist and black trousers cleared the gravel and burnt kvitprayer sheets (check if correct term) from a grave whose Hebrew name I couldn’t read. A chilling moment as we came out: when the Nazis took over, they desecrated the gravestones and took many away to use as paving slabs. Those which can be recovered have been, but fragments of others have been mortared together into a wall of shattered names.

Back to Wawel, in a burst of rain, to see the cathedral, which was just as good as previously but this time included a turn up the tower to see the gigantic bells, and the excitingly death-metal stylings of the Szafraniec chapel. We just had time to go back to the city museum for a coffee, a cake and a renewed assault on the second floor gallery’s Decorative Art exhibition. It was the expected medley of virtuoso woodcarving, giant church keys, ceramics, tapestry and Misc Cool Stuff (a double-sided violin in the musical instruments section caused incredible ergonomic confusion). Even the Meissen porcelain, usually so reminiscent of blank-faced, nightmare-inducing shepherdesses on elderly relatives’ shelves, was chosen for individuality and craftsmanship and hardly smashworthy at all. The collection of Empire furniture was particularly fine, as was an enjoyably bonkers neo-baroque chess set themed after Sobieski’s victory over the Ottomans (one of the Turkish knights has fallen off his horse).

Polish railways still have compartments (at least in first class, which I’d chosen because it was still incredibly cheap and I don’t think I’ve bought a first class ticket for myself anywhere). Ours contained four youngish Poles in headphones; after hearing an altercation in English a guard arrived, checked our tickets and ID, removed one of the Poles and informed us there was no restaurant car. At low speeds the train juddered and vibrated in odd ways, but the harmonics changed as we accelerated out of town and settled into a rhythm. At the edge of Krakow, a girl stood by the track and lifted the hem of her white dress in front of a gaggle of photographers.

Having relied on the restaurant car, we were starving, and upon our arrival in Wroclaw stopped at the first decent-looking kebab shop on the walk in to our airbnb. “Tomorrow is big day for Russia, there will be big bomb”, one of the proprietors fretted to a colleague.

Poland 2022
The Lost Wawel – Barbican, Celestat, Auschwitz – From Wieliczka to Wrocław – Racławice, Ostrow Tumski – Książ Castle – Museums of Wrocław – Gdansk town hall, Westerplatte – Malbork

Day two broke quiet and cool, the turrets of St Mary’s looking astoundingly Cold-War-photograph through the grey haze. At a place on Tomasza street we found something calling itself Milkbar Tomasza and set out to wipe away the memory of the heinous bar mlecny in Poznan once and for all. With success: Sam’s pancake was exquisite and my full Irish breakfast very sound, with proper thick cut back bacon.

Thus fortified, we set about the city’s fortifications ourselves. Krakow upgraded its defences heavily at the dawn of the gunpowder age to a formidable set of concentric curtain walls, moats and thick-walled fighting towers mounting early artillery (quite a similar response to the Device Forts, in fact, a  few decades earlier). But it was never quite rich enough (or threatened enough?) to upgrade them to full-on trace italienne at any point and so staggered on with these picturesque-but-increasingly-worthless until the early 19^th century when the (then Austrian) authorities demolished most of them and made a lovely park around the Old Town. But some were saved, thus the Barbican: fantastic both in the sense of being good and in looking like it belongs in a fantasy film, a big horseshoe of red brick topped with pointy little mini-turrets and riddled with as many odd-shaped loopholes as the British tax system. A gentleman in a mauve jerkin taunted us gently from the courtyard, let us play with his swords and armour, and having fully equipped Sam proceeded to beat him up with a sword. (I had no cash so left the castle and headed for a cashpoint to get him a tip; on my return he gave me a replica 15th century coin “for being honest”.)

A refugee support station by the main station was giving out food and medical aid to displaced Ukrainians, and the handsome late 19th century theatre had a huge ДЕТИ banner in solidarity with Mariupol. We had pastries and coffee and observed that while there weren’t many people around going full goth, the background level of let’s-call-it “Hot Topic quotient” is much higher than home.

As well as the Barbican itself and a quick jaunt through a surviving section of city battlements (individual towers named for the organisations responsible for their funding and upkeep: Haberdashers’ Tower, Carpenters’ Tower, etc) the Barbican ticket got us into the “Celestat”. This is the guildhall of the Fowlers’ Brotherhood: in both its historic tradesman’s-cartel past and present-day drinking-society-with-custom-bling nature very much like other medieval guilds, but, rather than engraving or silversmithing, their trade was shooting things. Sharpshooters’ guilds like this formed an important part of many city-states’ defences in the days before reliable national militaries. At regular contests, the best shot in Krakow was declared the Fowler King and awarded a huge silver cockerel on a neck chain. The club was full of decorative targets, antiquated marksman rifles, and paintings of various satisfied-looking men in Renaissancey getups with a big silver cock hanging round their necks (with gaps for the many years when the club was being repressed by one of Poland’s various authoritarian occupation governments). Outside, the Park Strzelecki – I know enough Slavic military vocabulary to work out it meant “Shooters’ Park” – seemed to be a sort of dumping ground for various recent and aggressively nationalistic statues about Polish history and Poland’s glorious yet endless struggles (in which Sobieski, his turban-mace-and-big-moustache iconography firmly established, features heavily).

Finding the bus station was easy (two American soldiers in uniform were wandering past as we approached) and buying a ticket for the coach we wanted even easier, especially by comparison with getting a drink out of the nearby vending machine. The “Lajkonik” coach rolled through the city’s clean outskirts to an open landscape, big box shops and wide sweeps of motorway giving way to boggy woods. Over the motorway sound barriers I could glimpse the odd cool modernist church, passing townscapes of church spires and tower blocks, the occasional striped factory chimney. Everything was cheerfully well-maintained, without the general weedy air of suffocating neglect and apathy in Russia. After around ninety minutes we arrived at Oświęcim, better known to history as Auschwitz.

I find it very difficult to write about any of this, or even think too hard for too long about it, and I do wonder how the guides manage. I don’t think I could in good conscience tell anyone to go to Auschwitz and at the same time it feels essential that everyone sees what was done here. Part of the horror of Auschwitz-1 is in how mundane and ordinary the fabric of it all seems: there isn’t anything intrinsically evil-feeling about most of the repurposed Polish army barracks and bunkers, their brick walls, cement floors, cheap old light fittings, and yet you stand in a room and are told that a hundred thousand people were murdered in it. And then: this is what two tonnes of human hair look like, shorn from murdered women to be sent to Germany to make carpet underlay. Here is a photo of a gaggle of confused children who will live for less time after the photo is taken than you will spend at the camp today. Here is a corridor of thousands upon thousands of mugshots of people who were killed, an incredible diversity of faces.  The guide moves from room to room, delivering each fact calmly and matter-of-factly; each horror sinks in but none can be dwelt upon for too long before another is described.

After Auschwitz-1 (with the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign), you take a shuttlebus to Auschwitz-Birkenau (the building with the railway arch). Unlike camp 1 there is nothing improvised or extemporised about this: it is an enormous factory, carefully designed and purpose-built to kill and burn people. An infinity of barracks stretch away on both sides, many reduced to the brick chimneys of the double-ended stoves that kept a few “useful” workers alive a little longer. At the railhead a simple triage process established those who would go to the barracks and those who would be murdered immediately. It is then a very short walk to the gas chamber/incinerator complexes. These were dynamited by the SS and the postwar communist government built a memorial between the ruins of two of them: an abstract line of concrete shapes on a sprawl of cobbled steps. It is clumsy, awkward and almost meaningless, and conveys the sense that they felt a statement had to be made but had no idea what to say.

Poland 2022
The Lost Wawel – Barbican, Celestat, Auschwitz – From Wieliczka to Wrocław – Racławice, Ostrow Tumski – Książ Castle – Museums of Wrocław – Gdansk town hall, Westerplatte – Malbork

Krakow, again. The place hasn’t changed very much since I was last here, still a marvellous fantasia of medieval and early renaissance royal bling cocooned in lovely ornate 18th and 19th century urbanism and set in a coronet of endless marching socialist-era tower blocks. But the war was quietly everywhere, dark military trucks on the roads, Ukrainian flags and the trident of Volodymyr hanging from random buildings. I was sat by a British-Ukrainian lady on the plane, on her way to Lviv to see off a relative and look after a house she’s putting up refugee families in. She told me all about her family, the many ways in which this horror has been wrecking their lives for nigh on a decade. I gave her eclairs for the takeoff and landing, and told her dark jokes (“how do you stop a Russian tank? – shoot the guys pushing it”) which got barrel laughs. She bought me a cup of tea and refused all attempts to contribute to her work.

Landing was perfectly smooth, apart from Sam’s plane out of Bristol (“My flight is branded BUZZ and has a cartoon bee on it. I’m concerned. I hope they’re taking this seriously”) ganking my landing slot. A train and then tram to our quiet third-floor Airbnb aparthotel, through streets under exuberant regeneration and dozens of public parks filled with painted ironwork, Morris columns and bursts of bright yellow dandelions.

The Rotunda, then and now.

We had a late lunch of excellent pierogi and headed through the bustling parks that have replaced the city’s old bastions to Wawel Castle, still possessed of the same eclectic fiddliness and intimidating immensity as last time. This time the exhibition of choice was “The Lost Wawel”, through rooms built through the half-buried skeletons of previous Wawels, with a notable standout the ancient, strikingly simple and beautiful rotunda of the saints Feliksa and Adaukta, now literally buried inside the walls. There was lots of the eclectic, organic, pre-Baroque decoration, with a strong classicism probably partly due to general Renaissance Romanophilia* but, I suspect, mostly because all the decent architects on hire were Italian.

“This is the stuff that led to people going ‘alright, enough’?”
“Yes, as a result of which a third of Europe destroyed everything beautiful and the other two thirds decided to go in even harder on the bling.”

Down by the river we saw Smok again. An old Ukrainian man was playing the violin, with an album cover featuring a much younger him in front of St Andrew’s in Kyiv. I took his bank details, and said “slava ukraini” – he took me for a Pole and responded “chwała polsce.”

We walked to the National Museum, a big chunky thing like a Stalinist version of the Doge’s Palace, but although on the door the museum claimed it was open til 7, disappointingly they actually closed at 1845 and passive-aggressively stopped me from going into the Decorative Art gallery  more than half an hour before close – another day, I suppose. So we only had time for the the top floor, home to some really striking bits of painting, sculpture, stained glass and other crafts both modern and pre-war (unlike Warsaw, the collection here has either been much better reconstituted or wasn’t as badly looted and burned in the war – I suspect the latter).

Google maps thought the Barbican was open until 10 so we headed there – but upon arrival it was obviously closed. We wandered back to the town square for a wander (attracting the usual dusk chorus of touts offering us titty bars and, possibly, drugs) and a stout (which turned out to be 9.5% – oh well) and then, at Dan’s recommendation, a huge and wonderful meal at a place called the the Black Duck – Georgian house wine, pork schnitzel for me and stuffed cabbage for Sam, the whole coming to perhaps £18 a head. Poland remains a marvellously hospitable place.

Poland 2022
The Lost Wawel – Barbican, Celestat, Auschwitz – From Wieliczka to Wrocław – Racławice, Ostrow Tumski – Książ Castle – Museums of Wrocław – Gdansk town hall, Westerplatte – Malbork