We take it for granted that Cracow is Cracow: attractive, interesting, with an urban layout, a look, and, if we dare use the word, a skyline that it would be unthinkable to change. Small and in many ways deliberately provincial, it nevertheless has high-profile features that make it more than a run-of-the-mill city. We tend to think it's always been this way - yet in this, we are mistaken. Toynbee wrote that history is the laborious process of showing why certain things didn't happen. That is what Jacek Purchla's concise, excellent book does. It shows how the one-time medieval capital avoided turning into just another medium-sized city with a trace or a re-creation, here and there, of a long-extinct past. Another Brno.

Cracow hit rock bottom in the mid-nineteenth century. Incorporated into Austria in 1846, it found itself impoverished, cut off from its natural trading connections to the north, and sinking into worse and worse poverty. It was a minor city, a backwater dump, with forty-odd thousand inhabitants living mostly in the old city where centuries-old buildings teetered under layers of grime and haphazard, ramshackle additions. The Rudawa meandered through uninhabited marshes between Wawel and the Blonia. A few buildings stood along Karmelicka, but farms and gardens took up most of the land on that side of town. The numerous buildings around the Kleparz farmers' market were predominantly tumbledown, thatch-roofed, single-story structures. East and south of the new railroad station lay the green expanses of the Wesola district, some of which, such as the English Gardens along Kopernika, offered beer and other refreshments to strollers in seasonable weather. Hardly anyone lived in that quarter. Further west the ground sloped down towards the St. Sebastian meadows (site of today's street of the same name) and several large monastery gardens in the shadow of Wawel. 

Kazimierz was an enclave cut off from Cracow by a branch of the Vistula (the "old Vistula," to which the name of ul. Starowislna refers) that flowed where ul. Dietla runs now. Its population lived mostly within the overcrowded, decrepit environs once encircled by the old Kazimierz city walls. Open, marshy ground surrounded the district on three sides. Only along ul. Krakowska, the Vienna road, did a few buildings stand, mostly inns for arriving travelers. 

As if all this wasn't bad enough, a fire broke out on Dolnych Mlynow in 1850 and spread into the old town, devastating most of the built-up area in the triangle formed by the edge of the Rynek, the archepiscopal palace, and ul. Poselska. Most of the Rynek and Wawel escaped the fire, but neither was much to look at in any case. The Austrian army was using Wawel as a barracks, and the Rynek was filled with swaybacked single-story storage sheds and roofed-over market stalls that had been accumulating there for so long that no one even knew anymore who owned what. Just to drive the final nail into the city's coffin, as it must have seemed then, the Austrian government declared in the same year as the fire that Cracow, which had only recently cleared away its medieval walls, was to be turned into a strategic fortress. Francis Joseph's military architects began studying plans for extensive demolition to clear the field of fire around Wawel, which they wanted to turn into a state-of-the-art citadel. 

Purchla's extensively illustrated book manages, within a hundred pages of densely-documented text, to tell the story of how Cracow managed to climb out of this morass and, by the time of the First World War, become more or less recognizable as the place it is today. 

Municipal development is often a fascinating story, and contemporaries can easily miss the complex forces behind it. The historian who hopes to unravel the tale in a satisfying way must understand administrative law, politics, finance, urban planning, architecture, and sociology. Purchla manages to tie these diverse threads together into a convincing narrative. All that Cracow Letters can hope to do is to offer a brief summary of Purchla's high points, without presuming to assess his expert arguments from a scholarly point of view. Thus encapsulated, it's a dramatic story. Not quite the stuff of high cinematic drama, as in Cracovian Roman Polanski's story of the making of modern Los Angeles in Chinatown, but close. 

The disastrous 1850 fire and, to a degree, the Austrian fortification program were both blessings in disguise, because they necessitated the rapid development of the local construction and building materials industries. Cracow sits on clay soil amidst limestone hills, so there was no shortage of raw ingredients, especially for bricks. The Austrians decided not to raze Wawel to make way for a citadel. Instead, they embarked on the construction of concentric rings of forts, many of which can still be seen in or near the city. The inner ring ran at a distance of 600 to 800 meters from the Rynek, more or less the same distance from the center of town as today's "Aleje." 

Almost until the First World War, this inner ring of fortresses marked the limit of development. Nothing could be built in a radius of several hundred meters without permission from the military, and property owners in the zone outside the fortified ring had to put up a "demolition bond" -- in other words, they had to guarantee that, in case of war, they would promptly tear down their own buildings, at their own expense, in order to clear the field of fire. This amounted to a ban on any substantial construction. Cracow was choking within the defensive girdle. 

Municipal development thus ended up being limited to the old town and the immediately adjacent districts. With all those bricks being produced, a general boom picking up steam in the first decades of the railroad age, and bureaucrats arriving in town form other parts of the empire, developers began buying up and building on every bit of available ground within the tightly constricted city. 

The owners of urban truck farms, orchards, and gardens "parceled out" their land, dividing it into lots. Builders worked hand-in-glove with the landowners. They often financed the first building, hoping that the example would draw in subsequent investors. The developers usually made this first structure as grand, and especially as high, as possible, in order to set an appropriately expensive pattern for those that followed. It was a seller's market, but by all rights it should have dried up quickly.

Cracow lacked the prerequisites for classical nineteenth- century urban growth. It had no industry to speak of, and the restrictions imposed by the Austrian fortifications meant that there was nowhere for industry to take root. It might just barely make sense to own a wooden cottage under conditions where the military authorities could demand that you pay to demolish it at a moment's notice, but investing in a factory on the same terms would be insane. In other nineteenth-century cities, industry drew workers from outlying districts, while also providing the capital to build housing to rent to these workers. This could not happen in Cracow.

Yet, in a paradoxical way, a general decline in the fortunes of the empire was a boon to Cracow. Especially after the disastrous defeat to Prussia in the Seven Week's War, the 1860s were a decade of rapid decentralization. The Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, and its most populous (but also its poorest) component was Galicia, with its capital in Lwow and its western metropolis, Cracow, situated along the railroad lines to Vienna and Silesia. Cracow won municipal self-government in 1866 and Galicia achieved autonomy the following year. Local administrators no longer had to speak German; neither did the university have to use that language. Galicia became the "Polish Piedmont" (an analogy to the northern Italian regions that were striving for independence after a similar period of autonomy). 

The newly independent local government dared from the beginning to run up deficits in order to finance public works, including construction. Furthermore, Cracow's role as a Polish city free to speak Polish, and to cherish the national traditions, turned out to be a key factor in its growth. 
Galicia itself was the most socially backward and politically conservative region, not only in Austria-Hungary, but probably in all of Europe. Magnate families like the Potockis and the Tarnowskis derived astronomical incomes from vast lands worked by peasant quasi-serfs, whose feudal obligations, far from being alleviated, actually grew more and more crushing. Thus the proverbial "Galician poverty" and the floodtide of emigration, mostly to America, from both the peasant cottages and the Jewish shtetele. (The lack of agricultural reform under the Austrians becomes comprehensible when we recall that those bedrock conservatives, the Galician magnates, were Francis Joseph's most vociferously loyal backers and provided Vienna with a disproportionate share of its cabinet members and prime ministers.)

The Galician magnates had staggering incomes to invest and to spend. The leading Austrian banks set up branches; this accounts for most of the bank buildings one now sees in the old town. With no architectural faculty of their own, Polish architects trained abroad, but the prospect of large commissions from wealthy investors lured the best of them home. So modern Cracow arose on the fortunes of agricultural magnates from the hinterlands. These Central European latifundistas built urban palaces to proclaim their own status and, to prove their virtue, they endowed foundations in their name and erected edifices devoted to charity, such as the Lubomirskis' impressive boys' home, now the Economics Academy administration building. The super-rich landowners also built apartment houses that were purely commercial ventures. 

Polish gentry who had been banished, dispossessed, or otherwise repressed in the areas occupied by Prussia and Russia sought refuge in Cracow, and brought with them whatever transportable capital they had. So did many Polish religious orders, especially after Bismarck launched his anti-Catholic Kulturkampf. The Jesuits bought the English Gardens on Kopernika and built a church and other institutions there; the same property now features their new institution of higher education and the state-of-the-art printing plant that they installed near the end of the communist era. 

Because the city was a beacon of Polish identity, local government and donors took an interest in renovating its run-down monuments. In one of the first organized landmark protection campaigns in the world, long-term projects supervised by the best architects ensured the restoration of many churches, as well as the clearing of the Rynek itself. Historical restoration and preservation are never objective or neutral. They involve choices; the Sukiennice functioned for centuries before acquiring the Renaissance form we know today. The towers of the Basilica of the Blessed Virgin on the Rynek looked far different in 1850 than they did in 1900. What architects and artisans thought suitable under Francis Joseph is what we take for granted today as the historical face of the city.

The biggest project was Wawel. The restorers followed their late nineteenth-century tastes and techniques in deciding what to keep, what to discard, and what hypothetical earlier structures to reconstruct in making the Polish national shrine, from its crypts (where they cleaned up and highlighted the royal sarcophagi) to the cupolas on the towers.

Before they could even get at Wawel, however, the Cracow city fathers had to persuade the Austrians to stop using it as a fort and barracks. They did so by financing large new barracks in town, such as the one on ul. Siemiradzkiego that is now police headquarters, or the one on Rajska that has housed the public library for the last several years. Anticipating casualties from a future war, the Austrians also built training and support facilities. One of their former riding schools, on Lubicz, now houses the Operetta. Another, on Zwierzyniecka, was torn down in 2002 to make way for a Sheraton hotel. The Austrians built a vast military hospital on ul. Wroclawska, and it has been a military hospital ever since. 

An abortive Austrian project put the final touches on the pre-World War I city and opened the door for the development that followed 1918. This was the grandiose idea of a canal system linking the Oder, the Danube, the Vistula, and the Dniester. Had it ever been built, Cracow would have become a nexus in an inland navigation system that enabled barge commerce from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The first step was to regulate the flow of the Vistula and its local tributaries. We can see the results today in the geometrical course and the levees of the Rudawa (which used to wander all around the Blonia before coming out near Wawel) and, even better, in the lovely stone-faced flood walls, landscaped dykes, and pedestrian boulevards along the river banks. Neither finances nor time permitted any further work. However, the project had great administrative impact. It was the pretext for "Greater Cracow," the vast expansion of the city that incorporated tracts of land beyond the inner ring of fortresses, and eventually made development there possible. 

As constricting as they may have been to the city's development, it must be noted, the Austrian fortresses nevertheless did the job when the time came. They stopped the Russian advance at Wieliczka in 1914, sparing the city destruction and an onerous occupation. 

Today's Cracow owes an incalculable debt to the city fathers of the late nineteenth century. Their brave decision to go into debt to finance public works accounts in large part for the fact that Cracow rose from the second league of Austro-Hungarian cities, such as Linz, Zagreb, Brno, and Trieste (all of which grew according to the classical industry-led model) to its present status as a contender, rivalled only by Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, for the title of Central Europe's most attractive city. 

Municipal growth is a long-term affair; sometimes it takes a century or more to make ideas tangible. Planning and preliminary work continues in the early twenty-first century for the new "Ulica Galicyjska" mall and urban center running from the southwest corner of the Planty past the train station. When it is finally built, if it is not too late, this development could alleviate the commercial burden on the historic areas around the Rynek, while simultaenously counteracting the destructive migration to peripheral malls that constitutes an unparalleled threat to the unique character of Cracow. 

Purchla shows how the local authorities attempted a similar shift in the city's center of gravity over a century earlier. They built the Slowacki Theatre and the monumental buildings along Basztowa near where Ulica Galicyjska will run someday, but never managed to erect a towering new city hall that was planned in the same quarter. 

Not building can sometimes have greater merit than building. The city fathers thus preserved the Planty, which developers wanted to parcel out (a hotel and a school at the foot of Wawel hill are the only projects in the Planty that they did not manage to block). It required commendable restraint to preserve what was left of the parks within the city. The land shortage was so great at the end of the period, and rents went up so high as a result, that some Cracovians, especially from the intellectual, artistic, and professional classes, opted for fresh air and more affordable prices in the suburbs, even if this meant commuting to work. 

A century ago, however, no mass exodus from the old city occurred. Purchla elucidates a mystery that still makes up an important part of the Cracovian character, and helps to explain why the city has stubbornly managed to preserve that character:

"Psychological factors also conditioned the reasons for the relatively slight depopulation of the Cracow city center. Within the Cracovian mentality there lay (and still lies to this day) 'a pathological attachment to the center of town, if not necessarily to living in the city center, then at least to supplying one's basic needs and to seeking entertainment exclusively there,' as Antoni Gorski, the president of the Conservative Club, observed at the time. The entire commercial network and the majority of public institutions were thus concentrated around the Rynek and the nearby streets. The staffs of these institutions, the mercantile assistants, and the apprentices nested in the cellars, back buildings, and attics of the city center, anywhere as long as they could be close to their bank, shop, or workshop. The concept of distance among the Cracovians of the day had changed little since medieval times. Each sally extra muros was a major undertaking, and for many Debniki, Podgorze, or Krowodrza were almost exotic names, associated with a day-long expedition. This may be a slight exaggeration, but the attachment to the city center was indeed characteristic of the mindset of at least a portion of Cracovians, and of significance to the overcrowding of the city. Even more interesting, and despite the crowding and the high rents, people working outside of town, including for instance the numerous railroad workers employed at the Plaszow-Podgorze station, wanted to live in the center. This led to a paradoxical situation. In 1905, the Railroad Directorate made a proposal to the Ministry of Railroads for the construction of a tract of houses for the railroad workers employed at the Plaszow-Podgorze junction. The Directorate planned to purchase 50 morgs of land in Prokocim and use the 'credit fund for petty state railroad officials and operatives' to erect a model colony of detached houses for 500 families (approximately half of the personnel). These houses would pass into the ownership of the railroad employees upon the payment of annual installments. The project, however, never came to fruition; this was the fault of the beneficiaries themselves. In a survey commissioned by the ministry, they responded negatively to the building of the residential colony in Prokocim, and demanded instead that personnel employed in Podgorze-Plaszow be allowed to live in Cracow and draw a set city housing allowance for their apartments" (p. 88). 

The railroad ended up building apartment blocks in the shadow of Cracow Main Station for its employees who worked at Plaszow; they doubtless walked to the station and rode the train to work outside of town. Now, passengers arriving at the Main Station from the east can still see those apartment blocks at the foot of the embankment out the right side of the train. Only after the Second World War would the communists build the mass workers' housing in Prokocim to which pre-World-War I railroaders said, "Thanks but no thanks." 

Despite the presence of their very own Tesco above the bus stop on the route into town, the dwellers in the prefabricated Prokocim "bloki," or their children, dream today of a loft apartment in one of those nineteenth-century Cracow townhouses, the origins of which Jacek Purchla so satisfyingly describes in this slender but invaluable study. 
 
 
 

Have an opinion on this article? Send us your comments
 

All material on this page © Cracow Letters 2003