Hi there my Hivean friends and followers!
Usually, museums are not really my thing as I am known to prefer the natural, outdoorsy stuff when it comes to exploring new places but since Krakow, this beautiful Polish city with a remarkably long and rich history, has been our nomadic base for one year already, I figured it´s kind of appropriate to visit at least some of the local museums.
There are many museums in Krakow and they further divide into different branches. The Historical Museum of Krakow must be one of the largest as it includes almost 20 branches or "sub museums" if you will. These include, for example, the Town Hall Tower, the Barbican Museum, the Old Synagogue, the City Defensive Walls, the Oskar Schindler´s Factory, the Gestapo Prison, the Podgorze Museum or the Rynek Underground. This post will be dedicated to the last one - the Rynek Underground.
There are at least 2 reasons that makes the Rynek Underground Museum special and different from the other Krakow museums. First, the entire complex of this museum is actually located under the ground, just below the surface of the main square in the very heart of the historic center of the city. And second, the museum is super modern and interactive, featuring a variety of latest technologies such as holograms, fog machines, touch screens, loudspeakers, projectors etc. All these technologies were used to achieve one goal - to recreate the unique atmosphere of medieval Krakow. That´s right - the tour around the Rynek Underground is the tour around Krakow in the medieval times and yes, it´s as cool as it sounds :) This museum was opened as recently as in 2010 and the creators did a really great job there. The whole complex covers a total area of more than 6,000 sq m (approximately 65,000 sq ft) and you can easily spend a couple of hours there, watching the exhibits and even interacting with some of them, all of that while soaking the very special atmosphere of the medieval city.
The illumination of the museum is very special too as it was designed to further intensify the overall atmosphere of the place, which is cool of course but actually not so cool if you want to take some photos there and you can bet I wanted that :D Generally, the place is very dark, mostly illuminated just by the fire holograms plus there are also colored spotlights focused on certain sections and exhibits, which makes for some very challenging environment for a photographer but let me now show you some of the pictures that I took in there. We will start out with a series of photos taken at different parts of the museum. As you will see, some exhibits are displayed in the remnants of the actual medieval tracts that were discovered under the main square.
And now I will share a couple of shots with you that I took in a little auditorium where the history of Krakow is projected in pictures on the wall. The photos cannot really do justice to the presentation but it was really impressive and highly educational. In fact, the Czech history has been connected with the Polish one at many points so a number of the names and historic events depicted in the presentation were familiar to me. Disclaimer: I am sorry but I guess I mixed the photos up a bit when editing so not all of them will be chronologically ordered...
I hope you enjoyed this post that was dedicated to the Rynek Underground, one of the branches of the Historical Museum of Krakow. If you are a history fan and happen to be in Krakow, you should really check out this place as it was a great experience even for me, someone who is not interested in history that much... The museum is open every day except Sunday. The regular price is 28 Polish Zloty (approximately 6 EUR or 7 USD) but on certain days, you can visit it for free, just like we did. To find out more about this interesting museum, feel free to visit their official website.
Posts about other Krakow museums that we have visited here, including the famous Oskar Schindler´s Factory, will show up here on my blog soon so stay tuned ;) Thanks for your attention everyone, have a nice day.
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