Cracow’s rich intellectual, spiritual and artistic life has received worldwide interest, thanks to its selection as one of the nine European Cities of Culture in 2000. This special year was overseen by the patronage of Cracow’s leading cultural residents: the poets Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, the film and theatre director Andrzej Wajda, and the composer Krzysztof Penderecki, who won a Grammy Award in 1988. Cracow has long been Poland’s cultural capital but the city’s wide range of culture and the appeal of Cracow’s artistic life have taken off since this year-long arts extravaganza and now more and more events take place all around the city.
Information on cultural events and tickets are available from Centrum
Informacji Kulturalnej (Cultural Information Centre), ulica
sw Jana 2 (tel: (012) 421 7787). There is a culture information
centre in central Cracow at Sukiennice,
Rynek Glowny 1/3 (tel: (012) 421 7706). The Cultural Information
Centre publishes a monthly magazine, Karnet,
which has listings in Polish and English.
Literary Notes
There are 2 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature closely associated with Cracow. Firstly, Czeslaw Milosz, author of The Captive Mind (1953), who died recently (Aug 2004). Secondly, poet Wislawa Szymborska, whose literary debut began with I Seek the World (1945), published in the supplement Fight (Walka) of Cracow’s daily newspaper, and was followed by the runaway success That’s What we Live For (1952) and many subsequent collections of poetry.
The leading Polish science fiction writer and the author of Solaris (1961), Stanislaw Lem, studied at Cracow’s Jagiellonian University. Although it is Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993) that has dramatically raised awareness of Cracow’s former Jewish population, it was Schindler’s Ark (which won the Booker Prize in 1982), by Thomas Kenneally, that first told the story. A good recent history of Cracow is Zdislaw Zygulski’s Cracow: An Illustrated History (2001).
To learn more about Krakow, visit http://letters.krakow.pl
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