Lesser Poland Culture & Language

Lesser Poland’s culture is the deepest in the country, because it is the part where the most survived.

Krakow’s intact past

The city was taken without a fight in 1945 and its buildings came through. That means the Gothic, Renaissance and baroque layers are original rather than reconstructed — Veit Stoss’s vast carved limewood altarpiece in St Mary’s, begun in 1477, was looted and recovered rather than destroyed, and the Cloth Hall has traded on the same spot since the fourteenth century.

The hejnal

A trumpet call sounded from St Mary’s tower every hour to the four points of the compass, breaking off abruptly mid-phrase. The story is that a thirteenth-century watchman was shot in the throat mid-warning during a Mongol raid; the interruption has been kept.

Szopki

Krakow’s nativity cribs are a folk art unlike any other: tall, fantastical constructions in coloured foil modelled on the city’s own architecture, made competitively each December. The tradition is UNESCO-listed.

Gorale culture

Highlander music with fiddles and a distinctive high vocal style, decorated timber architecture, and the Zakopane style invented by Stanislaw Witkiewicz in the 1890s as a deliberate national architecture.

Wooden churches

Scattered through the villages of the region are Gothic timber churches built without nails from horizontal larch logs, some dating to the fifteenth century, with painted interiors and shingled roofs. Six are UNESCO-listed, along with a separate group of Orthodox tserkvas in the south-east, and they are the most distinctive rural architecture in Poland — small, dark, smelling of old wood, and still in use.

Jewish Kazimierz

Seven historic synagogues, the Remuh cemetery, and a Jewish Culture Festival each summer that is one of the largest in Europe.

Polish is the language. The southern accent is softer than Warsaw’s, and in the mountains the Gorale dialect is distinct enough to be hard for other Poles — it preserves older forms and has its own vocabulary.

English is very widely spoken in Krakow, which has a large student population and decades of tourism; the standard is high. It is much less common in the villages and among older people.

German is understood by some, and Ukrainian is widely heard given the size of the community.

Useful: dzien dobry for good day, dziekuje for thank you, prosze for please, przepraszam for excuse me, and na zdrowie as a toast.

In the mountains, szczesc Boze is the traditional greeting on a trail and is still used.