Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Historic sites
Rogoźnica
In Rogoźnica near Strzegom, next to a former granite quarry, stood the German concentration camp Gross-Rosen. Some 125,000 prisoners passed through the main camp and its sub-camps, and the museum estimates the number of victims at about 40…
Historic sites
Bełżec
Bełżec was the first of the three German death camps of "Operation Reinhard", and the place where the Germans developed the killing methods later used at Sobibór and Treblinka. Between March and December 1942 some 450,000 Jews were murdere…
Historic sites
Sobibór
The Sobibór Museum and Memorial is a branch of the State Museum at Majdanek, set on the grounds of a Nazi German extermination camp that operated in occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943. Visitors walk a memorial avenue through pine forest, see…
Historic sites
Luboń
The Nazis called it the "camp of bloody revenge". Some 40,000 prisoners passed through the German penal and interrogation camp at Żabikowo, which operated from 1943 to 1945 on the edge of today's Luboń, just outside Poznań. Since 1979 the…
Historic sites
Kosów Lacki
In the forest near Kosów Lacki stand some 17,000 stones. Carved into 225 of them are the names of towns from which the Germans deported Jews to the Treblinka II extermination camp. In less than eighteen months, the museum estimates, 800,00…
Historic sites
Wizna
The Defense of Wizna at Góra Strękowa (VEEZ-na; goo-RA stren-KO-va) is an open-air war memorial where, on September 7-10, 1939, Polish soldiers under Captain Władysław Raginis held the Narew River line against General Heinz Guderian's XIX…
Historic sites
Leżajsk
At the Jewish cemetery on ul. Górna in Leżajsk stands the ohel – the tomb of Tzaddik Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717–1787), one of the fathers of Hasidism. It is the most visited tzaddik's grave in Poland: on the anniversary of his death, the…
Historic sites
Lublin
The State Museum at Majdanek in Lublin preserves the site of KL Lublin, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp that operated from 1941 to 1944. Founded in the fall of 1944, it is the oldest museum in the world commemorating the…
Historic sites
Kraków
The National Pantheon in Kraków occupies the brick crypts of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul at 52a Grodzka Street, halfway between the Main Square and Wawel Hill. Since 2012 it has been the resting place of outstanding figures of Poli…
Historic sites
Warszawa
The Sejm and Senate building complex at 4/6/8 Wiejska Street is the seat of the Polish parliament and also one of the most interesting lessons in 20th-century architecture in Warsaw. For more than four centuries the Polish Sejm had no perm…
Historic sites
Rzeszów
The Rzeszów Cellars Underground Route (Rzeszowskie Piwnice) is a maze of old merchants' cellars beneath the main square of Rzeszów (say "ZHEH-shoof"), linked into a 396-meter (1,300-foot) tourist route. You descend as deep as 10 meters, sq…
Historic sites
Kłodzko
The Kłodzko Underground Tourist Route (say "KWOTS-ko") is a roughly 600 m (2,000 ft) walk through medieval cellars and tunnels beneath the old town of Kłodzko in southwestern Poland, about 90 km (55 miles) south of Wrocław. Townspeople dug…
Historic sites
Imiołki
For most of the year the Lednica Fields are quiet meadows above Lake Lednica, with a white steel fish on the hill. Once a year, on the first Saturday of June, up to 100,000 young people gather here for the Lednica 2000 Youth Meeting – one…
Historic sites
Grunwald
The Grunwald Battlefield (say "GROON-vahld") in northern Poland's Warmia-Masuria region is where, on July 15, 1410, the combined armies of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania crushed the Teutonic Knights in one of the la…
Historic sites
Wiślica
Beneath and beside the Gothic collegiate church in Wiślica lie the foundations of three Romanesque churches, and in the crypt the Orants Slab – a gypsum floor with incised figures from around 1175–1177, unique worldwide. The relics are sho…
Historic sites
Suwałki
In a forest on the north-eastern edge of Suwałki lie stone burial mounds almost two thousand years old. The Yotvingian Cemetery Reserve protects a burial ground used from the 2nd to the 5th century AD, one of the best-known archaeological…
Historic sites
Zamość
The Zamość Rotunda is a circular 19th-century gun battery that became a German Gestapo prison and execution site during World War II. Today it is the Mausoleum of the Martyrdom of the Zamość Region, a memorial museum surrounded by a vast c…
Historic sites
Gdańsk
The BHP Hall of the Gdańsk Shipyard (Sala BHP, pronounced "SAH-lah beh-hah-PEH") is a modest brick building inside the former shipyard where, on August 31, 1980, striking workers and the communist government signed the August Agreements –…
Historic sites
Łódź
Radegast Station in Łódź (say "WOODGE") is the former railway station from which German occupiers deported the Jews of the Łódź Ghetto, known as Litzmannstadt Ghetto, to the Chełmno (Kulmhof) and Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. Today it is…
Historic sites
Zgorzelec
On the freezing night of 15 January 1941, in theatre barrack 27 B, the prisoner Olivier Messiaen and three fellow inmates performed the "Quartet for the End of Time" for the first time. Around 400 prisoners and guards listened. It is now o…
Historic sites
Tarnów
The Old Cemetery in Tarnów (Stary Cmentarz, once called the Zabłocie Cemetery) is one of the oldest surviving cemeteries in Poland — older than Warsaw's famous Powązki. Spread over less than four hectares in the south of this Renaissance t…
Historic sites
Białystok
The Jewish Heritage Trail in Białystok (pronounced "bee-AH-wih-stok") is a marked walking route through the places that tell the story of Jewish life in this northeastern Polish city: synagogues, industrialists' villas, old neighborhoods,…
Historic sites
gmina Pasłęk
The Copernicus Trail is a driving route through the places where Nicolaus Copernicus lived, worked and wrote "On the Revolutions". In its current form it is about 590 km long and links three provinces: Warmia-Masuria, Pomerania and Kuyavia…
Historic sites
Żarki
For centuries Żarki in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland was a Polish-Jewish town. The town's Jewish Heritage Trail leads through six stops — from Koziegłowska Street to the Old Market Square — and shows what remains of that community: a synag…