Start at the far end and walk in, the way an arriving merchant would.
The Barbican went up in 1498–99, the last and strongest thing Kraków ever built for its own defence. King Jan Olbracht laid the foundation stone; his catastrophic Moldavian campaign of 1497 and the pressure from Wallachia, the Tatars and the Ottomans are why it was built in a hurry. It is a Gothic brick drum with an internal diameter of a little over 24 metres and walls up to three metres thick, ringed by seven turrets and pierced by a hundred and thirty arrow loops. A moat about thirty metres wide ran round it, and a walled corridor — the szyja, the neck — carried the road across that moat to the gate. It is routinely described as one of only three surviving barbicans of its kind in Europe and the best preserved of them; treat that as the standard claim rather than a checked fact, and judge the thing itself, which is genuinely enormous from the inside.
St Florian’s Gate is the one gate of eight that still stands. The stone lower stage is about 1300; the brick storey above it, with its machicolated gallery on stone corbels, was added in the 15th century. It is 34.5 metres tall and it also carried a guild name, the Furriers’ Tower. This was the head of the Royal Route: coronation processions came in here and went down Floriańska to the square and on to Wawel.
The wall survives for one short stretch behind the gate, on ul. Pijarska, with three towers on it — the Carpenters’, the Joiners’ and the Haberdashers’ — each named for the guild that was responsible for manning and maintaining it. That is the medieval system made visible: the walls were not the king’s problem, they were the trades’.
It exists because of Feliks Radwański, who in January 1817 argued to the Senate of the Free City that pulling this piece down would let the north wind blow straight from Kleparz onto the market square and ruin the citizens’ health. The argument was nonsense and it worked.
The money-saving fact: the Barbican and the walls are 22 zł each, but the Museum of Kraków’s Kraków Średniowieczny route ticket is 64 zł normal / 56 zł reduced / 128 zł family and covers both plus the Town Hall Tower and Rynek Underground — 111 zł of tickets if bought separately.
