Kazimierz was not a suburb. Casimir III the Great chartered it in 1335 as a separate town with its own walls, its own market square and its own council, and it stayed separate from Kraków until 1800. In 1494 a fire tore through eight streets by plac Szczepański; the Jews of Kraków were blamed for it and moved out to Kazimierz, and this building went up soon afterwards on what became ulica Szeroka.
It is usually called the oldest surviving synagogue in Poland. Kraków’s own tourism board puts it more carefully — the oldest of Kraków’s synagogues, and one of the best preserved in the country — and that is the version we would repeat.
The thing worth understanding before you go in is that this was built as a defensible building. Its east side was set directly against the defensive wall of Kazimierz. When it burned about fifty years later, the rebuilding was given to Matteo Gucci, a Florentine working in Poland, who added a cantors’ room on the south side and a women’s hall on the north, put a Renaissance parapet on the roof, and kept the military character.
Inside is a tall Gothic prayer hall, with the aron kodesh — the niche in the east wall where the Torah scrolls were kept — and the bimah standing in the middle of the floor inside a wrought-iron cage. Be honest with yourself about what you are looking at: the Germans gutted the building during the occupation and destroyed even the Gothic vaulting and the Renaissance columns, and what stands was restored in the 1950s. It is now a branch of the Museum of Kraków, with a permanent exhibition on the history and culture of Kraków’s Jews — the festival year, the liturgical objects, family life.
As of August 2026 it is 22 zł normal, 16 zł reduced, 44 zł for a family of four, and free on Mondays, when it opens 10:00–15:00; Tuesday to Sunday it runs 09:00–17:00. An audio guide is 15 zł. If you want a synagogue that is still in use rather than a museum, the Remuh is a few doors up Szeroka at No. 40, with its cemetery behind it; the Jewish Religious Community opens them Sunday to Friday 09:00–16:00 and closes on Saturdays and Jewish holidays.
