|
With temperatures pushing -15 it's a comforting thought that Cracow has as many cafes as it does icicles. If you feel like banishing the cold with a steaming cuppa, it's worth chivvying out the cafe in Collegium Maius, the hallowed college at the heart of the Jagiellonian University.
Throughout February and March the cellar cafe is hosting an exhibition of black and white photographs recalling the city as it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's a modest exhibition and entry is free, but the pictures themselves are evocative.
Besides nostalgic shots of the Rynek (which seemed to have a good many more trees in the 20's and 30's) and the streets leading off the square, there are also some more poignant reminders of the city's past.
In the late nineteenth century the Austrians gave the Poles autonomy (meanwhile the Russians and Prussians were ever more repressive). Patriotic endeavours were given the go ahead by the Austrians, and there are several vivid photographs of processions through the city, including the laying to rest of national heros in Wawel Cathedral.
One memorable photograph captures the unveiling of the Adam Mickiewicz statue on Cracow's Market Square (1898). Forty years later this statue of Poland's national bard was being knocked down by the Nazis - an incident that was also captured on camera and shown here in the exhibition. A startling sequence of photographs follows the statue as it is wrenched from its plinth. The annihilation of such monuments was a neat metaphor for what was going on in the country as a whole. Amongst the first victims to be transported to Auschwitz was a group of professors from the Jagiellonian University upstairs.
| Source: NH | Feb.8.2005 |
|
| | | |