The parish church of the merchants who ran the square. The present brick building was raised on the burnt site of an earlier church destroyed in the Mongol raid of 1241: the chancel from the 1350s, the nave finished by the end of the 14th century. Its two towers are deliberately unequal — the taller carries the watch and the trumpet, the shorter the bells.
The altarpiece is the reason to come. Veit Stoss, called Wit Stwosz in Poland, was contracted by the city and worked on it from 1477 to 1489. It is a limewood and oak polyptych about 13 metres high and 11 metres wide with its wings open; the central scene is the Dormition of the Virgin, the figures in it are life-and-a-half size, and there are some two hundred of them across the whole work. The Germans dismantled it in 1939 and shipped it out; it was recovered from Nuremberg in 1946, and came back from a six-year conservation campaign in 2021. The wings are opened by hand at 11:50 each day (14:10 on Sundays and holidays) and closed at 18:00. Arrive before that and you see the outer, painted faces; stay and you watch it open.
Around it, look for the 14th-century stained glass in the chancel — some of the oldest surviving in Poland — and the blue vault of painted stars, which is Jan Matejko’s work of 1889–91, not medieval.
The hejnał mariacki is played from the taller tower every hour, on the hour, four times over: to Wawel for the king, to the square for the councillors, to the Florian Gate for arriving guests, and to the fire station, whose trumpeters have kept the duty. The tune stops mid-note. The bugle call is documented in the city’s pay records from 1392; the story that a trumpeter was shot in the throat by a Tatar arrow in 1241 is a 20th-century invention, popularised by an American children’s book of 1928. The midday call is broadcast live across Poland.
Tourists use the south door, not the west door, which is kept for prayer.
