Cracovia Culture

Kraków is considered by many to be the cultural capital of Poland. It was named the European Capital of Culture for the year 2000 by the European Union. Kraków has 28 museums and public art galleries. Among them are the main branch of Poland's National Museum and the Czartoryski Museum, the latter featuring works by Leonardo and Rembrandt. The city has several famous theaters, including: National Stary Theatre, a.k.a. The Old Theatre, Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, Bagatela Theatre, The Ludowy Theatre, and Groteska Theatre of Puppetry, as well as Opera Krakowska and Kraków Operetta.

Kraków hosts many annual and biannual artistic events, some of international significance, such as the Misteria Paschalia (baroque music), Sacrum-Profanum (contemporary music), Cracow Screen Festival (popular music), Festival of Polish Music (classical music), Dedications (theatre), Festival of Short Feature Films, Biennial of Graphic Arts, and the Jewish Culture Festival. It became the residence of two Polish Nobel laureates in literature: Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz; a third Nobel laureate, the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric also lived and studied in Krakow. Other former residents include famous Polish film directors Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski.

Points of interest outside the city include the Wieliczka salt mine, the Tatra Mountains 100 kilometers (62 mi) to the south, the historic city of Częstochowa, the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, and Ojcowski National Park, which includes Pieskowa Skała Castle.

1918 to the present

With the emergence of the Second Polish Republic, Kraków restored its role as a major academic and cultural centre with the establishment of new universities such as the AGH University of Science and Technology and the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, including a number of new and essential vocational schools. It became an important cultural centre for the Polish Jews with a Zionist youth movement relatively strong among the city's Jewish population. Kraków was also an influential centre of Jewish spiritual life, with all its manifestations of religious observance from Orthodox, to Chasidic and Reform flourishing side by side.

Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazi German forces turned the city into the capital of the General Government, a colonial authority headed by Hans Frank and seated in Wawel Castle. In an operation called "Sonderaktion Krakau", more than 180 university professors and academics were arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, though the survivors were later released on the request of prominent Italians. The Jewish population was first confined to a ghetto and later murdered or sent to concentration camps, including Płaszów and Auschwitz in Oświęcim.

Kraków remained relatively undamaged at the end of World War II. Allegedly Germans planned to destroy it with massive amounts of explosives, but according to the most popular of several versions of the story, Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev, after being informed by the Polish patriots of the German plan, tried to preserve Kraków from destruction by ordering a lightning attack on the city. The credibility of these accounts has been recently questioned by Polish historian Andrzej Chwalba, who in his recent works finds no evidence for any German plan of massive destruction and portrays Konev's strategy as ordinary, only accidentally resulting in reduced damage to Kraków, a fact that was later exaggerated into the myth of "Konev, savior of Kraków" by Soviet propaganda.

After the war, under the Stalinist regime, the intellectual and academic community of Kraków was put under total political control. The universities were soon deprived of their printing rights as well as their autonomy. The communist government of the People's Republic of Poland ordered construction of the country's largest steel mill in the newly-created suburb of Nowa Huta. The creation of the giant Lenin Steelworks (now Sendzimir Steelworks owned by Mittal) sealed Kraków's transformation from a university city to an industrial centre. The new working class, drawn by the industrialization of the city, contributed to its rapid population growth. Also, in an effort that spanned two decades, Karol Wojtyła, cardinal archbishop of Kraków, successfully lobbied for permission to build the first churches in the new industrial suburbs.