On confirming my presence at the opening of the Children of War exhibition at the Schindler museum, I asked whether the museum could recommend me a reasonable room for an overnight stay. I was offered two choices: the nearby Hotel Normalny (***) for 500 złotys, about £100, or a residence in Wawel Castle for 150 złotys, about £30. Naturally, I dropped everything to book the latter and pay for it online, despite it being over 30 minutes' walk from the museum. And I was warned that there was always the chance that in the case of a surprise state visit by some foreign dignitary and entourage, I might get bumped at the last minute. This did not happen.
At around 5pm on Thursday, I turned up at the guard house at the castle's Bernardine Gate to be given the key to the apartment, and was shown up by an armed guard. I left my rucksack in my bedroom and set off on foot to the museum for the event, to return later that evening for my night in Wawel Castle.
Below: the castle's residential apartments are in the ivy-clad building to the left; the Sandomierz tower is centre; the Bernardine Gate is just round the corner. The latter is a reminder of Nazi occupation; the gate and guard house were built in 1940 when the notorious Hans Frank, the governor-general of the occupied territories had his residence here. (He was hanged for war crimes in 1946.)
So – what was it like, spending the night in Wawel Castle? Well, the rooms are authentically old-school, sparse, monastic, luxurious in a 1920s kind of a way with polished parquet flooring and period furniture. And a bed that would be uncomfortably short for anyone over six feet tall.
Left: the bathroom in my apartment. The photo, taken with a 10mm lens, cannot quite capture the height of the room – I estimate it to be well over four metres, making it higher than it is long. Plumbing, fittings and fixtures speak of past epochs, but everything worked as it should (except for the kettle in the otherwise well-equipped and spacious kitchen).
Having walked over 19,000 paces, I was quite tired and went to sleep at half past nine, waking up at 7am, so nine and half hours sleep with vivid, but not particularly notable dreams (finding blue plastic badges shaped like sails, dated 1919, in regularly spaced holes in the soil of a Gloucestershire garden). No ghosts.
In the morning, I take the opportunity to look around the castle complex before heading back to the station. Below: view from my bedroom window, overlooking the gardens of the Bernadine Fathers.
Below: the cathedral (Bazylika archikatedralna św. Stanisława i św. Wacława) in its morning glory. Poland's Westminster Abbey. Even at eight am, early tourists are beginning to show up, and the delivery trucks are much in evidence. I spend some time wandering around before I head to the station for my train back to Chynów via Warka.
To quote from Withnail and I, "Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can't". I guess that the administrators of the Wawel Castle residential apartments have a fine line to tread between commercial reality (I'd estimate the market value of a night like this would be three to five times higher than what I paid) and the need to maintain the building as it is for the sake of posterity and national heritage. I guess my 150 złotys is a charge to cover the costs and no more; this is not something you can book for yourself. You need to be a guest of some public institutions like the Museum of Kraków that administers the Schindler's Factory museum. Or, I'd guess, the City of Kraków, or the Ministry of Something. Yes. I know it's a missed commercial opportunity, but even a tourist-facing city like Kraków has its limits.
(*** not its real name, but you get the picture – nothing out of the ordinary)
This time last year:
Immersed in Dali
This time five years ago:
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