Kraków
An opportunistic post: preparing for an event in this stunning city, I thought I'd show some unusual photos from a few years ago.
I am one of the hosts of a conference that happens in mid-October in Kraków, south of Poland, and I was asked to promote the event on social media and to whomever I can. Not that I didn't want to do that myself.
I remembered that in early 2019, we (me and family) spent a few great days in this city and I was sure I had my "good" camera with me. But time and aging memory plays strange tricks: turns out that I took all the photos using an iPhone 7, and we can all agree that is not nearly the best gadget to do so.
I called this post "opportunistic" because it is the first one where the quality of the photography does not take the front seat. The subject does.
Still, I found a few shots that are interesting enough to include in this blog. What's more, they show an unusual face of Kraków: the most popular monuments are all but absent. For a detailed list of what you can see in the photos, see the index after the photo gallery.
And, since I promised to promote this conference, here are some details: it is called Meet Central Europe, and it concerns the translation business. The venue – also notably absent from the post – is the Zabytkowy Dworzec, the glamorous former main rail station of Kraków. I've never been there, and I can't wait to discover it with a proper camera in hand.
Here is an index of the photos, from top to bottom and left to right:
1, 2: This is the Father Bernatek Foot Bridge with sculptures from the series "Between the Water and the Sky" by Jerzy Kȩdziora. This was in 2019, I don't know if the sculptures are still on the bridge.
3: This was taken close to the riverbank in the Podgórze district, not far from the foot bridge.
4: This is the Ghetto Heroes Square that pays homage to the former Jewish population of Kraków.
5: This is the Sukiennice, the felt merchants' hall in the main square of Kraków.
6: Śródmieście with a characteristic blue tram.
7: Fence of the Old Synagogue.
8: St Peter and Paul Church
9, 10: Inside the salt mine of Wieliczka, south-east of Kraków. This might have been the prototype of the Mória mines in The Lord of the Rings where the dwarves dug too greedily and too deep.
11, 12: The memorial of the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau (locally known as Oświȩcim). The last photo was taken in the Hungarian hall. Of all the roughly 1.1 million victims of Auschwitz, more than 320,000 were Hungarian.