On 5 June 1257 Duke Bolesław V the Chaste granted Kraków a location charter under Magdeburg law, and surveyors laid out a chessboard of streets around a square of roughly 200 by 200 metres. The plan has not been altered since. Note how the claim is usually worded before you repeat it: the city’s tourism board says this was the largest square in medieval Europe, and is one of the largest now. Those are two different statements, and only the first one is a superlative.
The square was never meant to be empty. Its middle block carried the town hall, the Cloth Hall, the Great Scales and the Small Scales where goods were weighed for tax, and the ranges of rich stalls called the Kramy Bogate. The Austrians took the town hall down in 1820 and left only its tower. The weigh-houses and the stalls came down too — their footings are what you walk over in Rynek Underground, four metres below your feet.
The Cloth Hall is the survivor. The 1257 charter gave the town the right to trade in cloth; by the later 13th century two rows of stalls stood here under a wooden roof. Around 1358 Casimir III the Great paid for a brick building — a roofed central hall 108 metres long and 10 metres wide, with vaulted stalls opening off it through pointed arcades. Fire destroyed it in 1555. It was rebuilt in Renaissance form between 1556 and 1559 under Master Pankracy, with Giovanni Maria Padovano’s loggias and the crested attic parapet associated with Santi Gucci. The arcaded aisles you actually walk through are much later: Tomasz Pryliński’s remodelling of 1875–79.
So the building is medieval in plan and function and Renaissance-to-Victorian in what you see. The central passage is free, always a public right of way, and lined with souvenir and amber stalls. Above it, the National Museum’s Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art is a separate ticket and a separate century.
Two free things to find. At the south-east corner, wedged where the square meets Grodzka, St Adalbert’s is one of the oldest stone churches in Poland, with 11th-century Romanesque masonry in its lower walls; its floor sits about two metres below the pavement because the square’s surface has risen by two to two and a half metres since it was built. And at the south-west corner, the Town Hall Tower is all that is left of the building that ran this square for five hundred years.
