Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Monuments & mounds
Turzańsk
Silent Memorial is an open-air gallery of portraits scattered across villages and painted directly onto the boards of old barns and sheds. Sanok-born artist Arkadiusz Andrejkow started the project in 2017 in the Subcarpathian region, and t…
Technical monuments
Jędrzejów
The Świętokrzyska Narrow-Gauge Railway, better known as the "Ciuchcia Express Ponidzie", is a heritage line running from Jędrzejów towards the Nida river. The tourist train rolls through the meadows, fields and woods of Ponidzie, and the f…
Other
Białowieża
The Białowieski Express looks like a little train, but it runs on tarmac: a road-going locomotive pulling a covered carriage that takes up to 30 people on a tour of Białowieża village and the edge of the primeval forest. The highlight is t…
Historic sites
Szczecin
Szczecin Central Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Poland and the third largest in Europe, after those in Hamburg and Manchester. Its more than 172 hectares (425 acres) form a vast landscaped park with tree-lined avenues, fountains, stre…
Landmarks
Węgrów
At the end of Ewangelicka Street in Węgrów stands a larch-wood church which — according to a tradition still alive today — was built in a single day. Around it lies the old Protestant cemetery with late 17th-century gravestones of Scottish…
Historic sites
Palmiry
The Palmiry Cemetery and Museum - Memorial Site (Cmentarz i Muzeum - Miejsce Pamięci Palmiry) is one of the most important memorials to the victims of German terror in 1939-1943 near Warsaw. Deep in Kampinos National Park, in the Czosnów m…
Historic sites
Bohoniki
The Muslim cemetery (mizar) in Bohoniki (bo-ho-NEE-kee) is the largest surviving mizar in Poland. It dates from the 18th century, covers about 2 hectares, and was declared a Polish Historic Monument in 2012. It lies in a pine forest in the…
Historic sites
Ossów
At Ossów, in August 1920, the fate of Warsaw hung in the balance. On the field where Polish soldiers – many of them only 16 to 18 years old – stopped the advance of the Red Army, there is now a cemetery with eight mass graves and the Chape…
Landmarks
Kraków
Rakowicki Cemetery (Cmentarz Rakowicki, roughly "rah-ko-VEETS-kee") in Kraków is the city's oldest municipal cemetery and one of Poland's most important burial grounds. Spread over more than 42 hectares of tree-lined avenues, it holds pain…
Historic sites
Bydlin
In the parish cemetery of Bydlin, at the foot of a hill crowned by castle ruins, stands a seven-metre sandstone cross. Beneath it, in a mass grave, lie 46 Polish Legionnaires killed at the Battle of Krzywopłoty in November 1914 — a clash J…
Historic sites
Brzesko
Behind a stone wall on ulica Czarnowiejska in Brzesko lie more than 500 soldiers from the First World War: Austrians, Germans and Russians buried side by side. Cemetery No. 276 is one of the burial grounds laid out by the Austro-Hungarian…
Historic sites
Poznań
The Cemetery of Distinguished Greater Poland Citizens (Cmentarz Zasłużonych Wielkopolan) on St. Adalbert's Hill is Poznań's oldest surviving cemetery and one of the most atmospheric corners of the city center. On a leafy slope of ivy, old…
Historic sites
Warszawa
The Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw (pronounced "oh-ko-POH-vah") is one of the largest Jewish burial grounds in Europe and one of the most moving places to visit in Poland's capital. Founded in 1806, it covers about 33 hectares…
Landmarks
Busko-Zdrój
Behind a stone wall on ul. Widuchowska, about a kilometre east of the centre of Busko-Zdrój, lies the cemetery of the spa town's former Jewish community. Not a single gravestone remains in its original place – the surviving matzevot have b…
Historic sites
Goniądz
On the southern edge of Goniądz, by the road to Downary, stone matzevot (Jewish gravestones) lie in the grass among young trees. This is the kirkut – the only place in town where you can still see a trace of the community that in the 19th…
Historic sites
Kazimierz Dolny
On a wooded ravine slope on Czerniawy Street, about 950 m south-east of the Market Square, lies the new Jewish cemetery of Kazimierz Dolny. Its best-known feature is the lapidarium – a wall made of several hundred fragments of matzevot, sp…
Historic sites
Lesko
The Lesko Jewish Cemetery ("LESS-ko") is one of the oldest and most important Jewish cemeteries in Poland. On a wooded hill a few hundred meters from the town's 17th-century synagogue, some 2,000 gravestones (matzevot) survive, the oldest…
Historic sites
Szydłowiec
No two headstones are alike in the Jewish cemetery of Szydłowiec. Local stonemasons, working the same sandstone used for the town hall and the parish church, carved candles, lions, deer, birds feeding their young and hands raised in blessi…
Historic sites
Zabrze
Behind a wall on ulica Cmentarna in Zabrze, modest matzevot (traditional Jewish headstones) stand next to tombs that look like mausoleums from a Christian cemetery. That contrast is the key to the place: the Jewish cemetery in Zabrze, foun…
Coast
Rewa
In the waters of Puck Bay near Rewa and Osłonino lie the remains of several ships, which divers call the Cmentarzysko Wraków (Shipwreck Graveyard). The best known is the wreck of the "Helena" – a wooden coastal sailing vessel that sank in…
Landmarks
Sandomierz
The plans for this college in Sandomierz were drawn in Rome, and one of the designs is still kept today in the National Library of France in Paris. The long white building on the edge of the Vistula escarpment has housed a school since 160…
Coast
Hel
The Hel Headland is the sandy tip of the Hel Peninsula (say it like "hell"), the spot where a 35 km sand spit north of Gdańsk finally runs out and the open Baltic meets the Bay of Gdańsk. Since 2013 a stone cairn called the Kashubian Mound…
Fortifications
Grudziądz
On the highest point of the Vistula escarpment, 60 metres above the river, the Prussians built a fortress that Napoleon's army never managed to take. Grudziądz Citadel is the heart of the Grudziądz Fortress – a ring of forts around the tow…
Fortifications
Warszawa
The Warsaw Citadel (Cytadela Warszawska, "tsi-ta-DEL-ah") is a 19th-century fortress in the Żoliborz district, built by the Russian Empire to control Warsaw after the failed November Uprising. For decades it was a symbol of tsarist repress…