| A
city's
culture--the continuity of people's lives in
a specific place |
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| Cracow... Krakow...Crakow... What's this place called, anyway? |
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 Happy New Year from Cracow Letters |
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| Coming Soon: Why Saint John Cantius Represents Survival for Cracow in the Coming Hard Times |
| Coming Soon: Professors Battle It Out In Mayoralty Contest Both contenders in the recent mayoralty election were academic specialists in the politics they have long opposed: In this corner, a leftist who studied the regime of the prewar "Colonels" regime. And in the other corner: a right-winger who wrote a hair-raising real-life thriller about 1947, the year the communists consolidated power. Cracow Letters blows the dust off old copies of the two professor-politicians' monographs. Read our reviews of Ryszard Terlecki's Dictatorship of Treason Jacek Majchrowski's Strong, United, Prepared. |
| Coming
Soon:
Atrocity on ulica Lobzowska: From a Cracow Cafe to the Auschwitz Death Wall Tucked away in a low building not far from the Main Square, the Cafe in the Artists' House looks almost the same today as when it opened in 1934. A hotbed of experimental cabaret and opposition politics before the German invasion, it stayed open under occupation restrictions--until the Gestapo came crashing in uninvited. -An Eyewitness Account of the Gestapo Raid -Deportations of Poles to Auschwitz from Cracow, April 1942 -Nazi policy towards Poland in the words of the Nazi leaders -Einsatzgruppen to Chechen Henchmen: Under the Nazi Heel See also: -A Young Voice Speaks Straight from the Cracow Ghetto -Zimmermann's War: From Cracow to Haifa, by Way of Hell |
| Memoirists Recall The Cracow of
their Youth See also: -Natan Gross's Elegy for Middle-Class Jewish Cracow -Roman Polanski's Cracow |
| Skating
Abroad Under the Old System, a 1970 worst-seller offered an ideologically sanitized look at the two years that Lenin spent here, writing, plotting, walking on the Blonia, bicycling to Lasek Wolski, and skating. See also: -The Lenin Museum in the 1980s |
| Also on
the Cracow
Letters Bookshelf: -History of Cracow: Under German Rule, 1939-1945 -History of Cracow: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1794-1918 -Jacek Purchla on the Making of Modern Cracow -Nostalgia for Galicia and Emperor Francis Joseph -Moishe and Ksawery: A Polish-Jewish Friendship -The Jazz Club that Fidel Castro Opened -Analyzing Tadeusz Kantor's Theater of Death and Memory -History of Cracow: Between the Wars, 1918-1939
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| All material on this site © Cracow Letters 2003-2006 |
 Layers of culture in Cracow: a stodgy rent-townhouse (left) on al. Slowackiego was headquarters of the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei) under the Germans between 1939 and 1945; in the building on the right, a 20th-century architect's own neo-Gothic residential showcase, the young Roman Polanski lost his innocence. |
| A
Taste of the Old System What was it like going out under "real socialism" before 1989? Two cafes and a restaurant that still smack of the vanished world. See also: -The Cafes of Atlantis, ca. 1987 |
| Shrine to a Vision by a "Sister of the
Second Choir" The mystic of the Divine Mercy, St. Faustina, lived at a convent on the outskirts of Cracow. The new shrine there is emerging as one of the world's leading Roman Catholic pilgrimage destinations. |
| Small Movie Theaters Cracow still
contains a few tiny, old-fashioned urban cinemas. In some cases, they
offer a repertoire that differs from the standard global fare. Inside,
these cinemas may sometimes be as romantic as a 1947 poem about them by
Galczynski. |