Travels with The Holiday Hat: Krakow
Writing Life: Alexandra Sokoloff
Every year Craig and I go on vacation with a group of our Scottish friends we call The Holiday Hat — because we pick the next year’s destination in a secret vote by putting our choices on slips of paper and drawing the destination out of a hat. The rules are simple: It has to be a European city with a direct flight of under 4 hours from Scotland, it can’t be the country we went to the year before, and we have to go to wherever comes out of the hat. Side trips are allowed and we also always draw three choices, so there are backups in case the first choice turns out to be just too hard to plan.
In the last few years we’ve been to Madrid, Seville, Bruges/Brussels, Dubrovnik, Berlin, Malaga and Krakow. This year we’re headed to Vienna, with side trips to Bratislava and Budapest. I’m gearing up for the trip by practicing German on Duolingo.
Because of the most excellent planners in our group, we’ve always stayed in great centrally located houses/hotels/apartments—last year in Krakow was no exception. We were five minutes’ walk across a park to the Main Square, one of the biggest, most famous and most beautiful grand squares in the medieval cities of Europe, right in the heart of Krakow’s Stare Miasto, the historic Old Town.
Krakow is one of those medieval cities that providentially has a large number of original buildings (from early Romanesque to Modernist), because it was never bombed by the Nazis, as they wanted to keep it as a city center for themselves. And of corse during the Nazi occupation, the Main Square was renamed Adolf Hitler-Platz, because you know how fascists love to slap their heinous names all over everything, throw themselves $45 million dollar birthday parades, s**t like that.)
And the Stare Miasto is a UNESCO World Heritage Site - one of a whopping three World Heritage sites we were able to visit on our trip.
TRAVEL TIP: If there is a World Heritage Site anywhere near where you are, no matter where you happen to be – GO.
These are legally protected sites of "cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity" —guaranteed mindblowing.
My favorite part of Krakow’s historic Old Town was Kasimiertz, the Jewish quarter established in the fourteenth century—which was not historically a ghetto, but a thriving cultural center and the ideal for many other European Jewish communities. Legend has it that King Kasimir created a protective independent city for Krakow’s Jewish population at the request of his favorite concubine, Esterka (Esther), who persuaded Kasimir to extend many other privileges and legal protections to Krakow’s Jews. (I loved the fairytale quality of a lot of the history we learned from a series of just excellent guides.)
Modern Kasimiertz blends history, culture and a whole lot of street art and music. And of course, Spielberg shot many scenes from Schindler’s List here. The magnificence of Main Square was great to walk through, but Kasimiertz was where we hung out.
The second World Heritage Site we toured was, of course, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
.
There are no adequate words for this experience. I only wish that every single person who voted for that Hitler-wannabe and his grotesque regime could be forced to stay on that site for a week, to walk that death camp along with the excellent guides, hearing the stories of how these extermination sites began with just the sort of propaganda, demonization and scapegoating of '“the other;” the repression of non-white races, women, LGBTQ+, artists, dissidents; the weaponization of Christianity, and all the other horrors that this monster and his minions are gleefully perpetrating on the US and the world. Plenty of the monsters’ supporters still wouldn’t get it. But surely some would.
The third WHS we visited was the Wieliczka Salt Mines. This is also, in a different way, not something I can adequately describe in words. The two-hour walk through just a tiny fraction of the mileage of this underground wonder has plenty of mining tunnels and caverns, (and a river!), but actually is less like visiting a coal mine and more like visiting a massive subterranean palace carved entirely out of salt. There are chapels, art galleries, and dining halls of incredible beauty. It has been a huge tourist attraction since the mid-1800s (when you could actually take a boat ride through the site on the underground river).
Our group really has travel down to an art. We’ve become experts at picking a mix of central old town locations; food walking tours, history and culture tours, bike tours, boat and beach experiences; museums; famous bars and restaurants; and the occasional wild card. Last year we took a chance on the Crazy Guide Tour of communist-era Krakow sites which turned out to be one of the funniest and most interesting experiences of all our trips, thanks to the insider knowledge delivered by performance art of our guides: Tomasz and Robert.
The whole group agrees that each trip gets even better than the last - we all totally commit to whatever comes out of that hat, and have gotten into such a flow of exploration and adventure that everything we do becomes magical.
It’s a privilege and a great joy to experience the world with friends like these.
Happy trails to all!
— Alex
Thanks for reading!
If you’d like to subscribe to my quarterly newsletter, for book news and events, sales and giveaways, that’s here:
If you’d like to hear more often (once or twice a month) about the author and expat life, subscribe right here:
If you’re looking for my weekly story structure newsletter, subscribe here:
Read more:
Full series free on Kindle Unlimited