GEEO Poland Google Earth Presentation

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USA

Today, I’d like to share a great experience I had while traveling to Poland through a non-profit organization called GEEO. GEEO helps educators travel abroad so that they can learn more about different cultures to share with their students. I was joined on my trip by educators and retired teachers from all around the United States.

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Europe

We traveled across the Atlantic Ocean from North America to Europe. Europe and Asia share a long land border to the east, but Europe is conventionally understood as a separate continent—one of seven on Earth. The ancient Greeks are the ones who created the concept of continents as we think of them today.

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Poland

Poland is right at the geographic heart of Europe, and it has no natural barriers—no mountains, no wide rivers, and only the Baltic Sea to the north—to protect it from powerful neighbors. The word “Poland” means “land of fields,” and that’s exactly what much of the country is: wide, open, flat plains that stretch in every direction.

For centuries, that geography defined Poland’s fate. The 16th century and the first half of the 17th century were Poland’s Golden Age, when its territory stretched far into Eastern Europe and it made immense wealth from grain exports. But the lack of natural borders also made it vulnerable. Armies could invade easily, and many times Poland was divided up or even erased from the map entirely. From 1795 to 1918, that’s exactly what happened—Poland didn’t exist as an independent country at all for over a century. Its territory was carved up into partitions and absorbed by its powerful neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. And yet, the Poles kept their language, their culture, their identity, and their will to be free. When World War I ended, Poland again became an independent country.

That story of disappearance and return has a significant impact on how Poles understand themselves. The Catholic Church has also been central to their identity for over a thousand years and was one of the few institutions that survived the partitioning.

Although Poland is a large country by European standards, it’s only about one-thirtieth the size of the United States—meaning you could fit more than 30 Polands within the U.S.! Around 40 million people live in Poland. Before World War II, it was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, which the Holocaust nearly destroyed entirely. That history makes Poland a place of profound importance for Jewish memory and for anyone who wants to understand the history of the Holocaust.

Today, Poland is a democracy, a member of NATO and the European Union, and one of Europe’s largest economies.

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Warsaw

Our trip began in Warsaw, Poland’s capital and largest city. More than three million people live in the Warsaw metropolitan area. (A metropolitan area is a major city plus its suburbs and nearby towns that have significant economic and social ties. [Can you use your city or a nearby city as an example?])

Warsaw sits on Poland’s longest river, called the Vistula River, in the middle of the country. The city has been Poland’s capital since 1596, and for centuries it was one of the great cultural and intellectual centers of Central Europe. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Warsaw is that the city was completely rebuilt after World War II.

Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, marking the start of World War II. Warsaw was quickly occupied, and the Nazis imposed brutal rule: Jewish residents were forcibly confined to a walled-off section of the city called the Warsaw Ghetto, and throughout the war, Poles faced executions, forced labor, and mass deportations. In April and May of 1943, the remaining Jewish residents of the Ghetto staged a desperate uprising, fighting back with smuggled weapons against overwhelming German forces. It was one of the most remarkable acts of resistance in the history of the Holocaust.

Then, in August 1944, the broader Polish underground resistance launched the Warsaw Uprising, a 63-day battle to liberate the city from German occupation. The uprising ultimately failed. In retaliation, Hitler ordered Warsaw to be completely destroyed, building by building. By the end of the war, approximately 85–90% of Warsaw’s buildings had been reduced to rubble. Warsaw was more thoroughly destroyed than any other major city in history.

After the war, the Poles made the extraordinary decision to rebuild Warsaw exactly as it had been before. Using old paintings, photographs, and architectural drawings, they meticulously reconstructed the city’s historic center, brick by brick. The rebuilt Old Town (Stare Miasto) is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognized not just for its beauty, but for what it represents: a people’s determination to reclaim their history and identity.

Do you know what a UNESCO World Heritage Site is? It is a landmark or area designated by the United Nations for having cultural or historical significance. The program is intended to conserve sites for future generations.

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Warsaw Old Town

I am going to show you some of the buildings in the Old Town. Remember as you see these images: almost everything in Warsaw is younger than your grandparents. It was rebuilt from rubble in less than a decade after the war, and rebuilt so faithfully that it can be hard to believe.

One surprising way they were able to rebuild the destroyed city so precisely was with paintings. In the 1760s and 1770s, an Italian artist named Bernardo Bellotto—who worked under the name Canaletto—was the court painter to Poland’s last king. He painted more than two dozen incredibly detailed views of Warsaw’s streets, so accurate that they are almost like photographs. Nearly two hundred years later, when architects needed to know exactly what a destroyed street had looked like, they turned to Canaletto’s paintings as blueprints. Imagine rebuilding your school using only paintings made 170 years earlier!

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Royal Castle

This is the Royal Castle, the residence of Poland’s kings after the capital moved here from Kraków. Today, since Poland does not have a king, the castle is a museum.

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Syrenka

In the Old Town Market Square, there is a statue of a sword-carrying mermaid, the Syrenka (pronunciation). This mermaid is the official symbol of Warsaw, appearing on the city’s coat of arms for centuries. According to legend, a mermaid swam from the Baltic Sea up the Vistula River, was rescued from a greedy merchant by local fishermen, and vowed to defend the city forever with her sword and shield. The legend even claims she’s the sister of Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid!

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Holy Cross Church

This is Holy Cross Church, which contains the embalmed heart of a famous Polish composer. Frédéric Chopin was born in 1810 in a village just outside Warsaw and grew up in the city. He left Poland at age twenty and never returned, but he asked that after his death, his heart be brought home. His sister smuggled it back in a jar, and today Chopin’s actual heart rests inside a stone pillar of Holy Cross Church. During World War II, the Nazis banned Chopin’s music because it was such a powerful symbol of Polish identity. Today, “musical benches” around the city play his melodies at the push of a button.

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Warsaw New Town

Another famous Pole was Maria Skłodowska—known to the world as Marie Curie. She was born here in Warsaw’s New Town in 1867, and there is a museum dedicated to her in her childhood home. Because Poland was under Russian rule at the time she grew up and women were banned from attending university, she studied in a secret, illegal school called the “Flying University” before moving to Paris. She became the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize, and she remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences (physics and chemistry). She even named one of the elements she discovered—polonium—after her homeland.

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Gdańsk

From Warsaw, we boarded a train north through the countryside to Gdańsk (pronunciation), Poland’s great port city on the Baltic Sea. Gdańsk sits where the Vistula River meets the sea, which made it Poland’s “window on the world” for a thousand years—the place where Polish grain, timber, and other natural resources were loaded onto ships bound for ports all across Europe.

In the Middle Ages, Gdańsk belonged to a group of cities called the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League was like a club of trading cities—a powerful alliance of merchant towns around the Baltic and North Seas that protected each other’s ships and business. Membership made Gdańsk enormously wealthy, and its merchants showed off that wealth by building the grand city gates, towers, and tall, narrow, richly decorated houses we saw during a walking tour with a local guide.

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Zuraw

One very cool building in Gdańsk is the Crane (Żuraw in Polish), a giant medieval port crane from the 1400s. It was the largest crane in medieval Europe, and it was powered entirely by people. Men walked inside two enormous wooden wheels, like human-sized hamster wheels, and their walking hoisted cargo weighing up to two tons out of ships’ holds.

Gdańsk is also known as the amber capital of the world. Amber is fossilized tree resin, roughly 40 million years old, and the Baltic coast holds the richest deposits on Earth. Sometimes ancient insects are trapped inside—just like in Jurassic Park! After big storms, people still comb the beaches hunting for pieces of this “gold of the North,” and the shops of Mariacka Street glow with amber jewelry.

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Westerplatte

On September 1, 1939, a German battleship anchored in the harbor outside the city opened fire on a small Polish military post here at Westerplatte, a peninsula at the harbor’s edge. Those were among the very first shots of World War II. The deadliest war in human history began right here. The roughly 200 Polish soldiers at Westerplatte were only expected to hold out for hours; they held out for seven days. By the war’s end, about 90% of Gdańsk’s historic city center lay in ruins, and like Warsaw, the beautiful old city we walked through was painstakingly rebuilt.

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St. Mary’s Church

Towering over Gdańsk’s old town is St. Mary’s Church, one of the largest brick churches in the world. The church can hold about 25,000 people—more than the entire population of many towns! It took roughly 160 years to build, from 1343 to 1502. Think about that: the stonemasons who laid the first bricks knew they would never live to see it finished.

Northern Poland sits on a flat, sandy plain with no good building stone, so medieval builders here perfected a style called Brick Gothic. Gothic architecture is the style of the great medieval cathedrals—soaring ceilings, pointed arches, and tall windows designed to lift your eyes (and thoughts) upward—but here it’s all done with millions of red bricks instead of carved stone.

Inside is a 15th-century astronomical clock that was the medieval version of a smartwatch: it displayed not just the hour, but the phases of the moon, the positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac, and a calendar of saints’ days. If you’re feeling energetic, you can climb about 400 steps up the tower for a panoramic view of the city’s red rooftops, the shipyard cranes, and the sea beyond.

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Long Market

The heart of Gdańsk is the Long Market (Długi Targ). It is located at the end of a route called the Royal Way—the route Polish kings paraded along when they visited the city.

The square is lined with tall, skinny merchant houses painted in golds, greens, and reds. The buildings are decorated with sculptures and gilded details. In old Gdańsk, your house’s front was your advertisement—it told everyone how successful you were.

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Artus Court

One of the buildings is Artus Court, a magnificent meeting hall where merchants gathered to do business and socialize. It’s named after King Arthur, because the merchants loved the legend of knights meeting as equals around a round table and wanted their own version.

In front of Artus Court stands the symbol of the city: the Neptune Fountain, a bronze statue of the Roman god of the sea that has stood here since 1633. Neptune represents Gdańsk’s bond with the sea, and he comes with a fun legend: annoyed by all the gold coins people tossed into his fountain, Neptune supposedly struck the water with his trident and smashed the coins into tiny golden flakes—which, the story goes, is how the city’s famous drink Goldwasser, with real flakes of gold floating in it, was invented.

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Gdańsk Shipyard & Solidarity

The Gdańsk Shipyard is just north of the old town. It is one of the most important places in the modern history of Europe. To understand why, you need to know what life was like in Poland after World War II. Poland fell under the control of the Soviet Union and became a communist country: one political party held all the power, there were no free elections, newspapers were censored, independent labor unions were banned, and store shelves were often empty. When shipyard workers protested rising food prices in 1970, the government’s forces opened fire, killing dozens of people. Three towering steel crosses near the shipyard gates—the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers—honor them today.

Then came August 1980. When a beloved crane operator named Anna Walentynowicz was unfairly fired, the shipyard’s workers went on strike. A strike is when workers refuse to work until their demands are met. An electrician named Lech Wałęsa (pronunciation), who had been fired years earlier for union activity, famously climbed over the shipyard fence to lead them. The strike spread along the coast and across the country, and after tense negotiations, the government gave in and signed an agreement allowing something that existed nowhere else in the communist world: an independent trade union. The workers named it Solidarity (Solidarność). Within about a year, 10 million Poles had joined—one out of every three working-age people in the country.

Then the government struck back. In December 1981 it declared martial law—military rule—sending tanks into the streets, arresting Solidarity’s leaders, and banning the union. But Solidarity survived underground, printing secret newspapers and organizing quietly. Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 (his wife accepted it for him, because he feared he wouldn’t be allowed back into Poland). The movement also drew strength from Pope John Paul II, the former archbishop of Kraków who in 1978 became the first Polish pope; his triumphant 1979 visit home, with its message “Do not be afraid,” inspired millions.

By 1989, Poland’s economy was crumbling and the government was forced to negotiate with the people it had jailed. The “Round Table Talks” led to partially free elections on June 4, 1989—and Solidarity won nearly every seat it was allowed to contest. Poland soon had the first non-communist government in the Soviet bloc, and within months, communist governments were falling across Eastern Europe, along with the Berlin Wall in November 1989. In 1990, Lech Wałęsa—the electrician who climbed the fence—was elected president of Poland. Today, the European Solidarity Centre, a striking museum built of rust-colored steel like a ship’s hull, stands at the shipyard gates and tells this whole story.

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Sopot

One morning we took a short ride to Sopot, a seaside resort town sandwiched between Gdańsk and another port city called Gdynia. Together the three form the “Tricity,” a metropolitan area strung along the coast. Sopot has been the place where Poles come to relax by the sea for two hundred years.

The Baltic Sea is one of the youngest and shallowest seas on Earth, and because so many rivers pour fresh water into it, it’s also one of the least salty. It’s beautiful—but chilly, even in the summer! After storms, beachcombers search the sand for pieces of amber washed up by the waves.

Sopot’s pride is its wooden pier, the Molo—at about 1,700 feet, it is the longest wooden pier in Europe. Strolling to the end, with sailboats on one side and the beach promenade behind you, is simply lovely.

The town’s main pedestrian street, Monte Cassino, is named in honor of the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, where Polish soldiers captured a heavily defended mountaintop monastery for the Allies after months of brutal fighting. Why were Polish soldiers fighting in Italy? Because even after their homeland was occupied, tens of thousands of Poles escaped and kept fighting on nearly every Allied front of World War II: in the skies over Britain, in North Africa, in Italy, and beyond. There are streets all over Poland named “Monte Cassino” in their memory.

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Wrocław

Next, we traveled south by train to Wrocław (pronunciation)—a very difficult city to pronounce! It is roughly “VROTS-wahf.” Wrocław is Poland’s third-largest city and one of its most interesting.

Wrocław has changed names and countries several times over the past thousand years. It has been known as Vratislavia, Breslau, and Wrocław, and it has belonged to Poland, to Bohemia (a medieval Czech kingdom), to Habsburg Austria, to Prussia and Germany, and—since 1945—to Poland again. After World War II, Poland’s borders moved westward, and Poland lost territory in the east to the Soviet Union and gained formerly German territory in the west, including Wrocław. Most of the city’s German residents were forced to leave, and Poles moved in—many of them refugees from the city of Lwów (today Lviv, in Ukraine), which Poland had lost in the east. An entire city’s population was essentially swapped.

Wrocław is called the “Venice of Poland” because it’s built across twelve islands on the Oder River, laced together by more than one hundred bridges.

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Market Square

We walked around the city past the Market Square—one of the largest in Poland—with its magnificent Gothic Old Town Hall. The astronomical clock on the tower has faced the square since 1580. Notice the colorful merchant houses around the square. There are two tiny medieval houses in one corner that are connected by an archway—the locals call them “Hansel and Gretel.”

There is a restaurant in the center of the Old Town Hall called Piwnica Świdnicka. It has been serving guests since 1273, making it one of the oldest restaurants in Europe. It was already two centuries old when Columbus sailed for the Americas!

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Wrocław’s Dwarfs

As you walk around Wrocław, you might start to feel like you’re being watched—by tiny bronze people. Knee-high dwarf statues, called (krasnale), hide all over the city: dwarfs pushing a boulder, a dwarf firefighter, dwarfs playing in an orchestra, a dwarf sleeping outside a hotel, even a dwarf withdrawing money at an ATM. The first five were sculpted by artist Tomasz Moczek in 2005, and the city fell so in love with them that today there are, by recent counts, more than 1,000! “Dwarf-hunting” is one of the most fun things you can do in Wrocław.

These adorable statues actually began as anti-government protest. In the 1980s, under martial law, the police painted over anti-communist graffiti with patches of white paint. A group of students and artists called the Orange Alternative started painting cheerful little dwarfs right on top of those fresh paint patches. The idea was brilliantly absurd: what could the government do—arrest people for painting gnomes? The movement grew into surreal street “happenings,” and in June 1988, about 10,000 people marched through Wrocław wearing pointy orange gnome hats, chanting “There is no freedom without dwarfs!” News photos of riot police arresting people dressed as gnomes made the government look ridiculous—and showed the world that fear of the regime was cracking. A year later, communism in Poland came to an end.

In 2001, the city placed a statue of “Papa Dwarf” at the spot where the Orange Alternative used to gather, to honor the movement. Every dwarf in the city today is a tiny descendant of that peaceful, laughing rebellion.

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Cathedral Island

The oldest part of Wrocław—settled more than a thousand years ago—is called Cathedral Island. This is the spot where Wrocław was founded. The cobblestone streets are dominated by the towering twin-spired Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, which was mostly destroyed in the last months of World War II and rebuilt afterward.

The small bridge crossing the Oder to Cathedral Island is called Tumski Bridge. Like many other famous bridges, Tumski Bridge is full of “love locks”—padlocks that couples fasten to the railing before throwing the key into the river.

Every evening at dusk, a lamplighter in a black cape and top hat walks around the island with a long brass pole, lighting its gas lamps by hand, one by one—around a hundred of them—just as lamplighters did two centuries ago. Wrocław is one of the last cities in the world that still employs a real lamplighter.

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Racławice Panorama

While in Poland, we learned about the Battle of Racławice, when the Poles fought against Russia in 1794. Wrocław commemorates the battle with something called a panorama. Before movies existed, panoramas were a popular form of entertainment: gigantic paintings wrapped in a full circle inside a round building, with real props—dirt, fences, wagon wheels—blending into the painted scenery. Standing in the panorama, surrounded on all sides, audiences felt transported to the scene. It was the virtual reality of the 1800s.

The Racławice Panorama is one of the few such paintings that survive today. It is about 50 feet tall and 374 feet long, and was painted in 1893–94 by a team of painters. It depicts April 4, 1794, when the Polish forces—including peasant volunteers armed with farming equipment—won a stunning victory over a Russian army during an uprising against the partitions of Poland.

The Polish fighters were led by Tadeusz Kościuszko. About 20 years before, in 1776, he had sailed to America to join the Revolution. He was one of the Continental Army’s most brilliant military engineers, and his fortifications helped win the Battle of Saratoga, the turning point of the war. He also designed the defenses at West Point, the future site of the U.S. Military Academy. He became close friends with Thomas Jefferson, and in his will he asked that his American wealth be used to free and educate enslaved people. Then he went home and led Poland’s fight for freedom. Bridges, counties, towns, monuments—and even the tallest mountain in Australia—are named after him. He’s buried among kings in Wawel Cathedral, which we’ll see soon in Kraków.

The painting itself was created and displayed in Lviv in modern-day Ukraine. After World War II, when Lviv was lost to the Soviet Union and its Polish residents were resettled in Wrocław, the giant canvas came west with them. But Poland’s communist government kept it rolled up in storage for forty years, because they did not want to display a painting celebrating Poles defeating a Russian army. It finally went back on public display in 1985, and Poles lined up for hours to see it.

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Churches of Peace

On a free day in Wrocław, some of us took an excursion to the Churches of Peace, another UNESCO World Heritage Site in Poland.

Some important context: The Thirty Years’ War, from 1618 to 1648, was one of the most destructive religious wars in European history. It was fought primarily between Catholic and Protestant states. When peace finally came in 1648, the Catholic Habsburg emperor who ruled this region grudgingly allowed the local Lutherans (Protestants) to build three churches—but under conditions designed to make them fail. The churches had to be built outside the town walls, with no towers and no bells, using only wood, clay, sand, and straw—no stone, no brick—and each had to be finished within a single year.

The Lutherans worked at incredible speed using humble materials, building the largest timber-framed religious buildings in Europe. Two of the original three churches survive today (the third burned down in the 1700s), and both are still active. The Church of Peace in Świdnica can hold about 7,500 people. It feels like standing inside an enormous, gilded wooden ship.

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Kraków

Our last train ride carried us to Kraków, Poland’s royal city. For more than 500 years, Kraków was the capital of Poland—the place where kings were crowned and buried—until the royal court moved to Warsaw in 1596. Ask a Pole, though, and many will tell you Kraków is still the country’s cultural and spiritual capital.

Kraków survived World War II largely intact. The medieval streets, churches, and townhouses there today are the originals—some more than 700 years old. In 1978, when UNESCO published its very first World Heritage List, Kraków’s historic center was one of only twelve sites on it, alongside places like the Galápagos Islands and Yellowstone. (A second Polish site made that same first list—the Wieliczka Salt Mine, which we’ll talk about soon.)

The city is said to be named for Krak, the wise king who founded the city on Wawel Hill—right above a dragon’s cave.

Do you see the ring of trees? They are planted where the medieval city walls once stood, surrounding the old city. There are only a few pieces of those walls surviving today. Just inside the old city is the Czartoryski Museum, which is home to Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Lady with an Ermine, one of only a handful of paintings by Leonardo anywhere in the world.

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Main Market Square

Kraków’s Main Market Square (Rynek Główny) was laid out in 1257, and it is the largest medieval town square in Europe, with roughly ten acres of open space. It has been the city’s common area for nearly 800 years. Street musicians, flower stalls, horse-drawn carriages, clouds of pigeons (legend says they’re enchanted knights waiting to be freed), and thousands of people crisscross it at all hours.

Right in the middle stands the Cloth Hall (Sukiennice)—essentially a 700-year-old shopping mall. In the Middle Ages, merchants traded cloth, spices, silk, and salt in its long central arcade; today its stalls sell amber, carved chess sets, and souvenirs. Nearby is the Town Hall Tower, the only remaining part of the old Kraków Town Hall, demolished in 1820 as part of the city’s plan to open up the Main Square.

All around the square are sky-blue street carts selling Kraków’s signature snack: the obwarzanek (pronunciation), a chewy ring of braided dough that is boiled and then baked, topped with poppy seeds, sesame, or salt. It looks like a cousin of the bagel and the pretzel—and it’s older than both: they were served in the Polish royal court as far back as 1394. By some estimates, close to 150,000 of them are sold in Kraków every single day. The European Union has even granted the obwarzanek krakowski “protected” status: just as true Champagne can only come from Champagne, France, a true obwarzanek can only be made in and around Kraków.

We took a cooking class in Kraków and learned to make them ourselves—rolling the dough into ropes, twisting them into rings, boiling, baking, and finally eating them warm, enjoying the same street food that Kraków’s kings, knights, and students have snacked on for more than six centuries.

— Stop 26 —

St. Mary’s Basilica & the Trumpeter

Looming over one corner of the Main Square is St. Mary’s Basilica, with its two famously mismatched brick towers (local legend blames two rival builder brothers).

Every hour, on the hour, day and night, a real live trumpeter opens a window at the top of the tallest tower—after climbing 272 steps—and plays a short, five-note tune (called the hejnał) to the north, south, east, and west. And every time, the melody stops abruptly, mid-note.

According to the legend, in 1241, as a Mongol army approached the city, a watchman in the tower raised the alarm with his trumpet—until an enemy arrow pierced his throat, cutting off the warning mid-note. Ever since, the story goes, the tune has broken off where his did, in his honor. Historians will tell you the legend is probably not true, but Poles cherish the story all the same. Since 1927, the tune has been broadcast live every day at noon on Polish national radio, making it one of the longest-running broadcast traditions in the world.

— Stop 27 —

Jagiellonian University

A few blocks from the square is Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364. That means this university is more than 650 years old—it was already two centuries old before the first university in the Americas was founded.

The university’s most famous student arrived in 1491: an 18-year-old from the city of Toruń named Nicolaus Copernicus. In Copernicus’s time, virtually everyone believed in the geocentric model of the universe—the idea that the Earth sat motionless at the center while the sun, moon, planets, and stars all revolved around us. It matched what people saw with their own eyes and what authorities had taught for over a thousand years.

Copernicus, after decades of observation and mathematics, argued something shocking: the heliocentric model—the Earth spins on its axis once a day and orbits the sun once a year, just like the other planets. He knew how controversial the idea was and delayed publishing his book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, until 1543, the year he died. His idea helped launch the Scientific Revolution, the era when careful observation and evidence began to overturn ancient assumptions about how the world works. A famous inscription on his monument in Warsaw sums him up: “He stopped the sun and moved the Earth.”

— Stop 28 —

Wawel Royal Castle

On the south end of the old city, there is a hill—called Wawel Hill—that rises above the Vistula River. On top of the hill sit the Wawel Royal Castle and Wawel Cathedral. For centuries, kings and queens were crowned, ruled, and buried here, and the crypts also hold national heroes, including Tadeusz Kościuszko, the freedom fighter we met back in Wrocław.

In the cathedral’s tower hangs the mighty Sigismund Bell, cast in 1520—one of the largest bells in Europe, so heavy that it takes a team of eight to twelve bell-ringers to swing it, which they do only on the most important national occasions.

Kraków’s oldest legend tells of the Wawel Dragon (Smok Wawelski), a fearsome beast that lived in a cave beneath this hill in the days of King Krak. The dragon demanded livestock (or, in scarier versions, people) from the terrified city. Knight after knight failed to slay it. Then a humble shoemaker’s apprentice named Skuba stuffed a sheepskin with sulfur and left it outside the dragon’s den. The dragon gulped it down, and as the sulfur burned in its belly, it rushed to the Vistula and drank… and drank… and drank… until it burst. The shoemaker was the hero of the city.

Today you can walk through the “Dragon’s Den,” a cave that winds down through the hill, and emerge at the riverbank beside a bronze dragon statue that breathes real fire every few minutes. And as you enter the cathedral, you can see giant “dragon bones” that have hung by the door for centuries. (Scientists say they’re actually the bones of a mammoth, a whale, and a woolly rhinoceros—Ice Age fossils that medieval people quite reasonably took for dragon remains.) Legend warns that if the bones ever fall, the world will end.

— Stop 29 —

Kazimierz

A short walk south of Wawel lies Kazimierz (pronunciation), founded in 1335 by King Casimir the Great. Casimir is remembered for welcoming Jewish people to Poland at a time when they were being expelled from much of Western Europe. For centuries afterward, Poland was one of the safest and most vibrant homes for Jewish life anywhere in Europe. By the 1930s, about 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland, the largest Jewish community in Europe, and roughly one out of every ten Poles. In Kraków, about one-fourth of the residents were Jewish. Seven historic synagogues still stand within a few blocks of each other in Kazimierz. A synagogue, if the word is new to you, is a Jewish house of worship, study, and community.

World War II shattered this community. The Nazi occupiers forced Kraków’s Jewish residents out of Kazimierz and into a cramped, walled ghetto across the river, and from there deported them to concentration camps. Oskar Schindler, a German businessman, protected about 1,200 Jewish workers by employing them in his enamelware factory. His factory is now a powerful museum about life in occupied Kraków, and director Steven Spielberg filmed much of Schindler’s List (1993) in the real streets of Kazimierz.

Today, the synagogues have been restored, a Jewish Community Centre has been built, and every summer the neighborhood hosts the Jewish Culture Festival—one of the largest celebrations of Jewish culture in the world, drawing tens of thousands of visitors.

— Stop 30 —

Auschwitz-Birkenau

About an hour’s drive west of Kraków stands one of the most important places of memory in the world: the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, on the grounds of the largest German Nazi concentration and extermination camp of World War II.

To understand this place, we need to understand the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis believed the hateful lie that Jews were an inferior “race” and set out to destroy them entirely. They also persecuted and murdered millions of others, including Poles, Roma and Sinti people, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, gay men, and political opponents.

Auschwitz began in 1940 as a camp for Polish prisoners and grew into a vast complex, where trains delivered families from all over occupied Europe directly to gas chambers. Of the roughly 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz, at least 1.1 million were murdered—about one million of them Jews.

Visitors today walk beneath the infamous iron gate with its cruel, lying slogan (“work sets you free”), through brick barracks that now hold the museum’s most wrenching exhibits: rooms filled with thousands of shoes, suitcases hand-labeled with their owners’ names and addresses, eyeglasses, and children’s clothing. Soviet soldiers liberated the camp on January 27, 1945, a date now observed around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Survivors of Auschwitz led the effort to preserve the site as a memorial and museum, which opened in 1947 and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 under its precise official name—”Auschwitz Birkenau: German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp”—so that no one could ever mislabel who built and ran it. More than a million people visit each year. A sign at the museum echoes the philosopher George Santayana’s warning that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. We visit to bear witness, to honor the victims as individuals, and to take personal responsibility for recognizing and opposing hatred and dehumanization wherever they appear. “Never again.”

— Stop 31 —

Wieliczka Salt Mine

Our final stop in Poland took us hundreds of feet underground: the Wieliczka (pronunciation) Salt Mine, where miners dug salt continuously for about 700 years, from the 13th century until 2007. Nine levels of tunnels stretch about 178 miles in total, reaching down 1,073 feet. Our tour began by descending a wooden staircase of 380 steps, then wound about two miles through chambers and corridors as deep as 443 feet below the surface—and even that covered less than 2% of the mine.

Why is there an ocean’s worth of salt under a landlocked field in southern Poland? Geology! In the distant past, a warm, shallow sea covered this region. As the climate changed, the sea slowly evaporated—the water turned to vapor and drifted away, but the salt in the water could not evaporate. It was left behind in massive beds that were later buried by movements of the Earth’s crust. Walking through Wieliczka, you are literally walking through the floor of an ancient ocean.

Why dig so deep just for salt? Because before refrigeration, salt was the world’s food preservative. It made the difference between eating in winter and starving. By some accounts, in its medieval heyday this one mine provided as much as a third of the Polish royal treasury’s income. Salt was so valuable in the ancient world that the Roman word for it, sal, is the origin of our word “salary.”

The mine contains eerie green underground lakes, centuries-old wooden mining machines, and even an underground health resort, where people with asthma and allergies come to breathe the mineral-rich air deep below ground. Famous visitors over the centuries have included Copernicus, Chopin, and the German writer Goethe. Along with Kraków’s old town, Wieliczka was on UNESCO’s very first World Heritage List in 1978. And yes—you can lick the walls. It’s salty.