Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Churches & monasteries
Jędrzejów
On the E77 road from Kielce to Kraków, in Mnichów near Jędrzejów, stands a wooden church that looks nothing like a typical village church. It was built of larch on a Latin-cross plan, with two small towers on the facade and an octagonal do…
Churches & monasteries
Nowy Targ
The wooden Church of the Holy Trinity and St Anthony the Abbot in Łopuszna (Nowy Targ municipality) is a late-Gothic building from the last decade of the 15th century, consecrated in 1504. It stands by the Dunajec river, where the Czerwonk…
Churches & monasteries
Koszęcin
To the left of the high altar in the wooden Holy Trinity Church in Koszęcin stands an oak stump about 2 metres high. According to tradition, it was beside this tree that the miller's daughter Wiktoria repeatedly saw three children asking f…
Churches & monasteries
Byczyna
At the western end of the village of Biskupice, on the north side of the road, stands a dark, weatherboarded church with a tall timber-frame tower. The name of the carpenter who built it and the names of its founders can still be read on t…
Churches & monasteries
Nowa Wieś Królewska
The larch-wood Church of St Andrew the Apostle in Nowa Wieś Królewska was built around 1550–1580, in the reign of King Sigismund Augustus, and is one of the oldest wooden churches in Greater Poland (Wielkopolska). It was most likely paid f…
Churches & monasteries
Sękowa
In the winter of 1914/1915, during fierce fighting on the front near Gorlice, soldiers pulled timber off the church at Sękowa to build trenches and to burn as firewood. That the church survived at all is thanks to rebuilding that began as…
Churches & monasteries
Istebna
The Church of Our Lady of Fatima on Stecówka stands in a broad mountain meadow in Istebna, at about 760 m above sea level, right on the red Main Beskid Trail. Today's wooden church is a faithful rebuild of the one that burned down on the n…
Churches & monasteries
Szalowa
From a distance the church in Szalowa looks like a masonry Baroque church: a twin-towered façade, a triangular gable, three aisles. In fact it is built of fir logs, between 1739 and 1756 – a rare case of carpenters translating the forms of…
Churches & monasteries
Szałsza
The church in Szałsza stands right by national road 78 between Tarnowskie Góry and Gliwice, and yet it is easy to miss – trees hide both the wooden church and the neighbouring manor. It is worth turning off: the shingled Church of the Nati…
Churches & monasteries
Szczyrk
On a tree-covered hill about 700 m east of St James's Square in the centre of Szczyrk stands a small shingled church that is the town's oldest historic building. It was built in 1797–1800, when the village had almost 2,000 inhabitants and…
Churches & monasteries
Tęgoborze
On St Just's Pass, a few steps from the busy national road 75 between Nowy Sącz and Brzesko, a small wooden Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary stands in a ring of old lime trees. This is where, on 10 June 1939, Janina Dowbor-Muśnick…
Churches & monasteries
Ulanów
From the outside it is a plain, austere, three-aisled larch church, but beyond the women's porch you step into an interior in the colour of sea water, covered entirely in paintings. The Church of St John the Baptist and St Barbara in Ulanó…
Churches & monasteries
Haczów
The wooden church in Haczów (say "HAH-choof"), dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and St. Michael the Archangel, is the largest Gothic wooden church in Europe and one of the oldest log-built churches in Poland. It stands in the…
Churches & monasteries
Kluczbork
In a small village seven kilometres from Kluczbork stands a wooden church whose altarpiece is older than the building itself. A Gothic triptych from 1370, almost three metres high, most likely came here from Opole and is regarded as the ol…
Churches & monasteries
Miasteczko Śląskie
For more than a century after the town was founded, the people of Miasteczko Śląskie walked to neighbouring Żyglin for Mass. They only built a church of their own — wooden, with a shingled roof and a covered arcade — in 1665–1667, and the…
Landmarks
Sulmierzyce
In the middle of the market square in Sulmierzyce stands a white, plastered building with a shingle roof and a turret whose weather vane bears the date 1743. Beneath the plaster are log walls: this is the only fully preserved wooden town h…
Old towns & squares
Kraków
For centuries, kings rode along this same route to Wawel to be crowned, and funeral processions carried their coffins the same way. The Royal Route runs from Matejko Square through St Florian's Gate, the Main Market Square and Grodzka and…
Landmarks
Gniezno
The Gniezno Doors are a pair of Romanesque bronze doors inside Gniezno Cathedral and one of the most important medieval artworks in Central Europe. Cast in the late 12th century, they tell the life and martyrdom of St. Adalbert in eighteen…
Landmarks
Gdańsk
Artus Court in Gdańsk is one of the grandest civic interiors in Poland: a Gothic hall where the city's wealthy merchants once met, feasted and did business. It stands on Long Market (Długi Targ), right behind the Neptune Fountain, in the h…
Landmarks
Toruń
On the site of today's Artus Court, the Second Peace of Toruń was sworn in 1466 – the treaty under which Gdańsk Pomerania, and with it access to the sea, returned to Poland. The present building at Rynek Staromiejski 6 is already the third…
Museums
Ciężkowice
On a hill above the Biała river, opposite Ciężkowice, stands a white manor house with a columned porch – Ignacy Jan Paderewski's only home in Poland. The pianist and prime minister bought it in 1897, and his original Petrof piano now stand…
Landmarks
Brenna
The Kossak Manor in Górki Wielkie (say "GOOR-kee VYEL-kyeh") is the partly rebuilt ruin of an 18th-century country house in southern Poland's Cieszyn Silesia region, where the Kossak family of artists and writers lived from 1922. Its best-…
Museums
Złoty Potok
In the summer of 1857 the poet Zygmunt Krasiński lived in this single-storey Neoclassical manor house in Złoty Potok – and he gave names to many of the surrounding rocks, springs and ponds, including the Irydion pond below the palace. Toda…
Palaces
Janów
This small manor house with a columned portico, tucked beneath old trees in the hamlet of Bystrzanowice-Dwór, passed through the hands of three well-known families within two centuries: the Bystrzanowskis, the Krasińskis and the Raczyńskis…