Lady C-S and I arrived in Krakow late yesterday. A mistake that many travellers make is to go back to a city that they loved, hoping, expecting it to be the same – cities change and so do we (though perhaps Rosewood and its citizens are exceptions?). Our family visited Krakow on our first trip to Europe in 2004 – the time we spent here was magical. Our second visit in 2011 with Catrina, also. But, last night, we went back to the Old Town Square….

Not so magical. Crowds. Souvenir hunters. Tourist touts. Boozy bachelors on bike tours. In a whirl of lights, St Mary’s Basilica and the Cloth Hall were glorious, as always, but the press of raucous crowds pushing to buy, to see the next site, clambering for a selfie … took the shine away. Should we have returned, we wondered – is it a case of third time unlucky, perhaps?

Of course not. Venture away from the madding crowd and you find yourself strolling through a snow-filled Planty Park built on the site of the city’s  destroyed medieval walls. You can wander along an impressively wide walkway for four kilometres – all the way to the fortress walls of Krakow’s imposing castle. Or, you can meander across one of the bridges spanning the Vistula River from the edge of Kazimiercz towards what was the second world war Jewish ghetto.

Here you can pause at a monument square filled with empty chairs. Each of the 70 chairs represents one thousand lost lives – none of the inhabitants of the ghetto survived. Yet again, Poland demands a remembering of its brutal history and demands an honouring of those sacrificed to war. It’s sobering.

Yes, you can return to cities where you have walked before because you can never see it all. There are always new places to explore through different eyes.

We find ourselves doing our own remembering. Exploded champagne bottles we had left to cool on our apartment’s veranda one Christmas Day we shared with Catrina. Twelve year old Mitchell sitting on one of the many benches in Planty Park surrounded by snow, or the profound impact of a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The vendors on corners selling bagels. Or Natalie as a fifteen year old begging for time at the town’s internet cafe: pre her first mobile phone!

Travel to places is about viewing the world anew, we change and towns change (well, most towns). The chance to return to a city again yields this, as well as a remembering. Tomorrow we will avoid the main square, but will revel in finding undiscovered corners or unexpected revisits – all the spaces and places that a return to Krakow provides so generously. Just like a visit to the old country: Rosewood by any other name.

Farley

From our first visit to Krakow

Planty Park

Seventy empty chairs ..

Our street