Kraków escaped the bombs that flattened Warsaw, so its history stands in original stone: Romanesque crypts, royal tombs, a 14th-century Jewish town, and the ghetto and camp sites of 1941-45, all walkable in three days.
The seat of Polish kings from 1038. The Renaissance arcaded courtyard was built 1507-1536 for Zygmunt I; the Treasury holds Szczerbiec, the coronation sword used from 1320. Open 9:30-17:00 Tue-Sun, timed tickets.
Coronation and burial church of Poland since 1320. Beneath it lie Jagiellonian kings, Kościuszko, Piłsudski and Sikorski; the Zygmunt Bell of 1520 weighs 12.6 tonnes and needs eight ringers. Cathedral itself free, crypts ticketed.
An underground route through the excavated foundations of the pre-Romanesque Rotunda of SS Felix and Adauctus from around 1000 AD, plus traces of the 10th-century stronghold that predates the Polish state's Christianisation.
Four metres under the Main Square, a 6,000 m² excavation of the 1257 market layout: merchant stalls, lead-smelting workshops, medieval cobbles and skeletal burials, presented with holograms and touchscreens.
Schindler's actual administrative building at Lipowa 4, now a museum of the occupation: a reconstructed ghetto tram, ration cards, resistance printing presses and the wall of Schindler's list survivors' names.
The deportation point of the Kraków Ghetto, liquidated 13-14 March 1943. Since 2005, 70 oversized bronze chairs stand empty across the square, referencing the furniture left scattered in the street after the round-ups.
Tadeusz Pankiewicz was the only Pole permitted to live inside the ghetto, running this pharmacy as a news drop, hiding place and source of free sedatives. His memoir 'The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy' was written here.
Two surviving stretches of the 1941 ghetto wall, built in the shape of Jewish tombstones on the Germans' orders. A plaque records the words: 'Here they lived, suffered and died at the hands of the Hitlerite executioners.'
Poland's oldest surviving synagogue, built around 1470 and remodelled in Renaissance style by Matteo Gucci after 1570. Gutted by the Germans in 1939, restored 1956-59 and now the Jewish history branch of the Kraków Museum.
The Stalinist steel town begun in 1949 as a proletarian counterweight to bourgeois Kraków. Socialist-realist arcades radiate from the central square; the 1960 fight over the Arka Pana church became a symbol of anti-communist resistance.
Guided descent into nuclear fallout shelters built beneath Nowa Huta's apartment blocks in the 1950s, with original filtration equipment, civil-defence posters and the Museum of PRL branch documenting daily life under communism.
The milk bar was a communist-era institution: state-subsidised canteens feeding workers cheaply. Order żurek in a bread bowl and grilled oscypek, the smoked sheep cheese carried down from the Tatra highlands since the 15th century.