Travel to Poland: Cities

Glimpses of Warsaw, Torun, Cracow, and laggard Lublin.

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Warsaw's Old Town, or Stare Miasto, meticulously rebuilt after 1945 but too tidy and colorful.

Surrounding the old city is the Glorious Socialist city that arose on Warsaw's post-war ruins. Come to think of it, it's not so different from some of those height-controlled avenues in Washington, D.C., and the traffic's a lot better.

Power station? Nope? Monumental subway entrance? Nope. What is it? A Glorious Socialist food palace, abandoned in the post-socialist economy.

Inside: a security tower, a reminder that not everyone could be relied upon to take only according to their needs.

What killed those Food Palaces? Here's part of the answer: a spanking-new wholesale food market on the west side of Warsaw.

Inside. The shoppers are mostly shopowners themselves, buying in quantity.

But not all are shopowners: faith has its privileges.

Ikea shelves, next door to the Warsaw railway station.

The Vistula River at Torun, with St. John's Church standing tall. It contains Copernicus' baptismal font.

A splendid example of brick-filled timber framing. It's in Bydgoszcz and unlikely to go away soon.

On the west side of Torun, Western investment.

The Florian Gate, the only surviving medieval gate of old Cracow.  It opens into Florianska Street and terminates in the distance at St. Mary's Church, at the east end of the great Market Square or Rynek Glowny. Notice the establishment on the left?

Yes, it's McDonald's, but very discretely done, as this rear courtyard suggests. Someday, somebody should write about how the company sometimes does things well.

The Jewish Cemetery on the south side of Cracow. It's densely packed, with stones encroaching on walkways and piled on earlier stones until the ground is left in a state of seeming upheaval.  If you're here alone on a quiet day, you can imagine hands reaching up and beckoning.

On the west side of Cracow.

Another neighbor: Oswiecim, or Auschwitz. Here, outside the part of the camp that's preserved as a museum, and with its sinister lettering almost obscured in shade: the old office of the camp commandant, now an apartment house for Polish military families.

Central Lublin makes a dismal contrast with Cracow's Market Square and Warsaw's Old Town.

A mile east of Lublin, the near-deserted grounds of the Nazi concentration camp Majdanek. A mountain of human ash is preserved, along with the heavy steel doors of gas chambers and thousands of pairs of shoes, carefully sorted by size.