In chronological terms, this was the first volume in the monumental Dzieje Krakowa series. It came out in 1979, and set a pattern for the next two volumes. No easy task, writing a historical overview of a city with such a rich and well-preserved history. 

Far be it from Cracow Letters, no specialist journal, to judge the professional performance of the authors, eminent local historians. We aspire to nothing more than providing the interested and reasonably aware general reader with a few moments of diversion and a smattering of factoids culled from this voluminous tome. Let us only observe that there is interesting material on every page, and that the history of the time, still vivid and surprisingly relevant, lies in wait around every streetcorner. 

If you want to get the full story, you're going to have to read the book. However, a quick overview might identify some things that keep happening over and over again, and other things that happened only once. 

One element of nineteenth-century history that still recurs is the Cracovian tendency to snobbery. This phenomenon drew strength from the fact that aristocrats, made rich by their estates in the nearby hinterlands, purchased or erected city palaces. They moved to town, often in order to engage in local politics or to be near good schools for their children, and brought their country house manners and lifestyle with them. They liked to associate with their own kind, and did so constantly, but especially in the carnival season, before decamping  to the country for the summer. The same social rhythm obtains today.

The middle classes, some of whom had amassed fortunes of their own in commerce, copied the ways of their social betters. Gentry customs and outlooks filtered down into the bourgeoisie (and later, as sociological studies show, even into the proletariat). Lawyers, the clergy, university professors, and lesser teachers always bulked demographically large; it was a white-collar city. German traders and petty officials moved in, and many quickly adopted a patriotic Polish identity. Whatever their origins, most of the burgers aspired to official posts. They called it "urzedomania" -- the mania for office. The hopeful paraded on the "A-B line" in the Rynek, dreaming of being noticed: "slender-legged lieutenants tugging at their close-fitting jackets . . . future ministers and aspirants to the mayor's armchair, politicians of all parties and members of countless commissions, sub-commissions, and committees," as Witkacy later noted, looking back on the 1890s (p. 249). 

A coalition of aristocrats, clergy, and conservative intellectuals called the shots at the dawn of autonomy. Only gradually did the power of this stifling coalition melt away. It tottered when a public scandal broke out over the discovery that an unbalanced nun, Barbara Ubryk, was kept bricked up in solitary confinement in a convent. In the kind of controversy that encapsulates the essence of Cracow, an even bigger ruckus broke out when word leaked that the bones of King Kazimierz the Great had been uncovered in Wawel Cathedral and that the ruling clique had tried to sweep them under the carpet, so to speak, out of fear that a grand reinterment -- which took place in the end -- might kindle inconvenient patriotic sentiments. This was political dynamite because the conservative establishment remained loyal -- or, as increasing numbers of critics contended -- servile towards the Austro-Hungarian power center in Vienna. The Polish refusal to submit to outside domination gradually ate away at the foundations of this establishment. 

In the Free City, students formed radical secret organizations ready to fight for national freedom and social equality; by the turn of the century, they were demonstrating against the bishop's sway over appointments in the theology faculty at the university. 

Another element of continuity may be perceived in the local fascination with burials and reburials. The Cracow mortuary obsession, in which high-profile obsequies took on important political subtexts, began with the burials of Prince Joseph Poniatowski and of Kosciuszko soon after the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, and continued through the century and into the next.

Just as today, so in the nineteenth century, Cracow somehow embodied the essence of all things Polish. The city was not only the funeral home of the stateless Polish nation, in the words of Czuma and Mazan, but also its Mecca and its Jerusalem. Like Moses unable to do more than peer into the Promised Land, Poles suffering under the Russian yoke could at least draw sustenance from a distant glimpse of Cracow near the border of the Tsarist zone, as in this 1857 report: "Beyond the grotto in Ojcow, there is a hill, and Cracow, the Kosciuszko Mound, and the spires of Our Lady can be seen from there. From that hill, one sees not only with one's eyes, but also with one's heart and soul, and peers intently because the soul is exalted at the sight of those monuments, and the heartbeat gallops. Is there a Pole who would not travel to Cracow or, this being forbidden, to this hilltop in order at least to glimpse that place from a distance and commend that cradle of patriotic fame to God in fervent prayer -- Krakow....Who could fail to love and honor Cracow! (p. 261)." 

Another aspect of the nineteenth century that seems like a rehearsal for later historical patterns is the way that things took a positive turn just at the moment when the situation looked hopeless. A decade after mid-century, Cracow hit rock bottom. "This is the saddest moment in the history of Cracow," wrote Wladyslaw Sabowski; "streets all piled with rubble that the citizens do not even clean up because a sort of apathy rules them all....At Wawel, once the seat of kings, a shelter house for the enfeebled elderly and the crippled, or 
barracks for the army, a bureaucrat nominated by the viceroy plays at mayor in city hall, cannons standing at the guardhouse on the Rynek watch lest a stubbornly Polish spirit show itself from beneath a bourgeois cloak....Rubble, misery, poverty, the prevalence of the German language -- that is the image of Cracow up to the year 1860." The city had become a backwater and, worse, it was trapped in a failing empire.

Yet the weakness of Francis Joseph's empire turned out to be the key to Cracow's re-emergence. Weakened by threats from outside and within their multi-cultural empire, the Habsburg rulers had no choice but to decentralize.

Even 1866, when the Austrians at last granted autonomy to the city, began with a bad omen. The great Zygmunt Bell at Wawel cracked while ringing in the New Year. Yet, under home rule and a series of larger-than-life mayors of whom at least some were great, Cracow launched upon thirty incredible years of development in which it took on the form we know today. It learned how to live with, and how to make a living from, its past. Regular tourist trails emerged. The passionate amateur local historian Ambrozy Grabowski discovered the identity of the sculptor who had carved the altarpiece in the Basilica of the Blessed Virgin. Legends invented a generation earlier by Konstanty Majeranowski became a part of every Polish child's early education (and still are to this day). Patriotic organizations began holding courses for guides to meet the needs of the tourist influx. 

Amidst these continual trends that we take for granted, the city embarked on one great restoration project after another. Each landmark represented an unrepeatable challenge, and they got it right every time. Diligently scraping down to the threadbare and often rotting medieval vaults and beams, architects and decorators rebuilt the Sukiennice, Collegium Maius, and, most importantly, Wawel, in the shape they have today and will have forever. When we walk around town and view these monuments, we must remind ourselves that we are not seeing structures that have remained unchanged since the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Rather, we are seeing late-nineteenth-century visions of what the putative originals should have looked like. Both the engineering enterprise and, more importantly, the imaginative power are monuments to that spurt of civic assertiveness when Francis Joseph I granted the freedom to realize dreams nurtured during long decades of miasma and subjugation. 

The city filled in the fetid "Old Vistula" that had to be crossed to get to Kazimierz, leaving us the pleasing sweep of ul. Dietla. It kept the Planty and the great urban meadows of the Blonia free of development, while allowing Dr. Jordan, "the stork of the Habsburgs," to build his physical exercise park next to the latter. It adapted the old Arsenal to house the Czartoryski collections and turned the upper floor of the newly rebuilt Drapers' Hall over to a national museum of Polish painting. It built Collegium Novum in neo-Gothic style, and soon a wave of patriotic neo-romanticism was blossoming in the coffee houses amidst sniggers at the old fogey counts, bishops, and professors. Or was it merely decadence? By the turn of the century, even as they were expiring of pneumonia or the pox, rebel poets reigned on the stage of the new city theatre, a jewel-box look-alike for the Paris Opera. Controversy and satire reigned in cabarets where artists, models, and free-thinking intellectuals sat among vodka, tobacco, and absinthe fumes, listening to skits and songs whose double entendres and single entendres constituted an unending assault on bourgeois mores. 

A city cannot live by scintillating intellect and monuments alone. Can it? Nineteenth-century Cracow made great progress in practical terms.The period covered in this volume opened with the decision to tear down the crumbling medieval walls and the moat around them, which had become an open sewer. By the final pages, Cracow has railroad stations, electric streetlights replacing the gas ones, telephones, and streetcars (trams), some of which run on almost the same routes as in 2003.

One of the last great projects to be built before World War I was the municipal water company, an institution at least as commendable for its architecture as for its infrastructural value -- take a stroll out Smolensk or a ride towards Bielany, if you doubt these words, and admire the elegant brick waterworks complexes. Then consider this, and realize that it could probably have happened only in Cracow. In the late 1880s, the city had lacked an adequate supply of fresh water for decades, if not forever. Yet the budget was tight, following all the recent construction and restoration work. There was money to build either a grand new theatre, or the water works. Not both. Which did they build first?

Do you really need to ask? 
 
 

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Thanks for this, and thanks again. My great grandfather left Cracow before the first world war and this article and the rest of the site give me an idea of the kind of world he was a young man in. I love it!
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