Discover Greater Poland

Greater Poland is where the country started. The first Piast rulers had their seats here in the tenth century, and Gniezno was the first capital and the seat of the archbishop who crowned Poland’s kings; the Polish name for the province, Wielkopolska, means exactly what the English does.

Poznań, the main city, sits on the Warta between Berlin and Warsaw and has been a trading town for a thousand years. Its old town square is one of the finest in Poland, and on the town hall two mechanical goats butt heads at noon, which the city treats as a serious civic occasion. The cathedral, on an island in the river, holds the tombs of the first Polish rulers. Poznań is also the country’s trade-fair city, which gives it more hotel capacity and better restaurants than its size would suggest.

Around it the province is flat, farmed and dotted with lakes, with the Piast Route linking the early medieval sites and a national park of glacial hills and beech forest at Wielkopolski. The local speciality is the St Martin’s croissant, made to a protected recipe with white poppy seed, sold by the tonne on 11 November and rarely found elsewhere. Spring and early autumn are the best times; the winters are grey.