Poland, the Heart of Europe: Krakow, Warsaw, Torun & Gdansk
12 - 24 June 2013
Tour Highlights
Join Dr Iva Rosario and Tony Rosario on an unforgettable tour of Poland. The tour examines the development of three great European cities: Krakow, Warsaw and Gdansk. The tour's special characteristics include:
- • Extended stays in these three cities so that you may achieve a full understanding of their development and present character
- • The magnificent old cities of Kraków, Torun and Gdansk, with built environments of lovely Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque churches and palaces, the equal of cities such as Prague
- • Some of Central Europe's grandest castles, including the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights, Malbork Castle.
- • A music performance in Krakow and Warsaw.
About the Tour
The tour encapsulates the history of Poland, through urbanism, architecture and art in four of Central Europe’s most beautiful cities: Kraków, Warsaw, Torun and Gdansk. In great churches, royal and aristocratic palaces, fine market precincts with beautiful merchant houses, and some of Europe’s greatest castles, we explore the fascinating rise of Central Europe’s most powerful Renaissance state, which was annihilated after 1795, reborn after WWI, subjected by the Soviets after WWII and led the fight against the USSR in the 1980s. In dynastic monuments like Kraków’s Wawel Royal Castle and Warsaw’s Royal Palace we explore the creative adaption of Western Gothic and Renaissance forms. We examine Poland’s role as the bastion of Catholicism in a world of Russian Orthodoxy, Swedish Protestantism, Turkish Islam and Communist secularism in Kraków’s SS Stanislas and Wenceslas and Warsaw’s St John’s Cathedral, in beautiful city churches and in the extraordinary shrine of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. In the North, we explore Polish interactions with the Teutonic Knights in the vast Malbork Castle and with the Hanseatic League in the Gdansk’s fascinating medieval port and its and Torún’s lovely merchant houses. Medieval Poland also derived riches from salt, mined in the vast Wieliczka Salt Mine that incorporates subterranean chapels carved entirely from salt. Poland’s great wealth led to the inauguration of Kraków’s University, one of the world’s oldest, where the great Nicholas Copernicus studied. This tour will also encounter the places where other great Poles, like Frédéric Chopin and Marie Curie, lived and worked. In royal collections we see masterpieces like Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermin, and on our journeys between Poland’s magnificent Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque cities you will experience lovely rural landscapes largely untouched by the ravages of industrial modernity.
13 DAYS Krakow (4 nights) • Warsaw (4 nights) • Torun (1 night) • Gdansk (3 nights)
