Start in Kraków if you have three days and in Warsaw if you have a week. Kraków keeps the old royal centre the war left standing, and the day trips out of it are the country's heaviest hitters: the salt mine at Wieliczka, the memorial at Oświęcim, and the Tatra mountains above Zakopane. Warsaw is the opposite case, a rebuilt Old Town under a skyline of towers, and the better city to understand the twentieth century in. Add Gdańsk for the Baltic, the shipyard and a main street of merchant houses, and pair it with Sopot for the beach. Wrocław and Poznań are the western pair, market squares and student energy, and Toruń is the Gothic town nobody bombed. Go east, to Lublin, the Białowieża forest or the Masurian lakes, and you are travelling where Poles holiday. May, September and early June are the best weeks: warm, long days, and the school holidays either side of you.
5 Poland city guides
Fun fact
The first UNESCO World Heritage List, drawn up in 1978, held twelve entries, and two of them were Polish: the historic centre of Kraków and the royal salt mine at Wieliczka. Poland put a city and a mine on the list before most countries had anything on it at all.
Stereotypes, sorted out
The realityIt has been in the EU since 2004 and was the only member economy to grow through 2009 rather than shrink. What a visitor actually meets is contactless payment on a tram, a bank app that pays by code, and a rebuilt city centre with a glass skyline behind it. The grey exists, in the block estates on the edge of every city, and it is where most people live rather than a ruin left over from something.
The realityPoland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria for 123 years until 1918, and the borders then moved several hundred kilometres west in 1945. The seams are still visible: railway density, the shape of a village, whether the market square is Gothic or nineteenth-century, and the food. Gdańsk, Wrocław and Szczecin were German cities that became Polish inside one lifetime, and Kraków spent the nineteenth century under Vienna, which is why it has coffee houses.
The realityIt has a continental climate, which means the winters are properly cold and the summers are properly hot. July regularly runs past 30 degrees, the Baltic beaches are full through August, and the Masurian lakes are a sailing holiday rather than a bracing one. The month to fear is not January but November.
The realityThat is the standard week, and it leaves out most of the country. The Baltic coast has dunes that move, a spit you can walk out along, and three cities in a row. Wrocław is built on a dozen islands. Białowieża is the last big patch of primeval lowland forest in Europe, with wild bison in it. Łódź has a four-kilometre street of mill-owners' palaces and no tourists on it at all.
How to fit in
- Take your shoes off when you enter someone's home. You will usually be handed slippers, and refusing them is stranger than accepting.
- Say dzień dobry when you walk into a small shop, a bakery or a doctor's waiting room, and do widzenia when you leave. It is not optional politeness, it is the greeting.
- Give flowers in odd numbers, and never chrysanthemums. Those are for graves, and 1 November is when the whole country visits them.
- Queue properly and let people off the tram before you get on. Poles are quiet in public transport and notice those who are not.
- Treat the memorials as memorials. Sites of the occupation and the Holocaust are everywhere, they are not scenery, and photographing yourself in front of them reads exactly as badly as it sounds.
- Accept the second helping, or say no three times. Feeding a guest is how hospitality is expressed, and one polite refusal will be taken as modesty.
Famous Polish faces
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Nicolaus Copernicus
Frédéric Chopin
John Paul II
Lech Wałęsa
Wisława Szymborska
Andrzej Wajda
Robert Lewandowski
Stefan Banach
Marian Rejewski
Ignacy Łukasiewicz
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Agnieszka Holland
Krzysztof Penderecki
Czesław Miłosz
Olga Tokarczuk
Stanisław Lem
Iga Świątek
Adam Małysz
Kamil Stoch
Must-try Polish food
Pierogi
Boiled dumplings, then fried if you ask. Ruskie (potato and twaróg cheese) are the default, and the meat, cabbage-and-mushroom and blueberry versions are all standard.
Bigos
Sauerkraut and fresh cabbage cooked down for days with sausage, pork and dried mushrooms. It improves every time it is reheated, which is the point of it.
Kotlet schabowy
A pork chop beaten flat, breaded and fried, served with potatoes and shredded cabbage salad. The Sunday lunch of the whole country.
Gołąbki
Cabbage leaves rolled around minced meat and rice and baked under tomato sauce. The name means little pigeons, which they are not.
Placki ziemniaczane
Grated potato pancakes fried crisp, eaten with sour cream, or under goulash in the mountains where they are a whole dinner.
Żurek
Sour rye soup, cloudy and tangy from fermented rye starter, with white sausage and half a boiled egg. Served in a bread bowl for tourists and a plate for everyone else.
Barszcz czerwony
Clear beetroot broth, deep red and sharp. Drunk from a cup, or served with uszka, tiny mushroom dumplings, at Christmas Eve supper.
Rosół
Chicken broth with noodles, cooked slowly enough to run clear. The first course at every Polish Sunday table and the standard cure for everything.
Chłodnik
Cold soup of soured milk and young beetroot, shocking pink, with dill, radish and egg. A summer dish, and the only one on this list you will not meet in winter.
Zapiekanka
Half a baguette under mushrooms and melted cheese, finished with a stripe of ketchup. Invented in the 1970s and still the late-night default, most famously in Kraków's Kazimierz.
Obwarzanek krakowski
The braided ring sold from blue carts all over Kraków, plain, poppy or salted. Protected by name, so the ones outside the city are something else.
Milk bar lunch
The bar mleczny is a subsidised canteen left over from the communist era and still trading: soup, a main and a compote, ordered at a hatch. Cash, no ceremony, and the cheapest honest meal in the country.
Oscypek
Smoked sheep's cheese from the Podhale highlands, pressed in a carved spindle mould and grilled with cranberry on every Zakopane street. Made in the season the sheep are up on the pasture.
Rogal świętomarciński
Poznań's St Martin's croissant, filled with white poppy seed, nuts and candied fruit. Protected by name and eaten in quantity around 11 November.
Pyry z gzikiem
Greater Poland's plate of jacket potatoes with twaróg beaten with cream, chives and radish. Peasant food that Poznań has never stopped serving.
Śledź
Herring in oil with onion, or in cream with apple, served cold with a shot beside it. A Baltic staple and the standard opener at any family table.
Pierniki toruńskie
Toruń has baked spiced gingerbread since the Middle Ages, pressed into carved wooden moulds. The hard ones are for keeping, the soft ones for eating.
Pączki
Yeasted doughnuts filled with rose jam and glazed. Eaten all year and eaten seriously on Fat Thursday, when the queues run out of the bakery doors.
Sernik
Cheesecake made with twaróg rather than cream cheese, so it is drier, denser and less sweet than the American version. Often with raisins, sometimes under chocolate.
Makowiec
Poppy seed rolled through sweet yeast dough and sliced into spirals. A Christmas and Easter cake that bakeries sell the whole year.