CRACOW.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 294, 10 December 1914, Page 6

CRACOW.

There are 150,000 people in Cracow, asd 110,000 of them are Poles. It was only quite recently that the ancient city fell into the power of a Teutonic dynasty and became part of the “ramshackle empire” of Austria. In 1810 Cracow was still her own mistress, the last relic of the great Polish kingdom. Then Austria, with an enthusiasm worthy of Herr von Bethmaim-Holl-weg, tore up the treaty by which she had guaranteed the town of Cracow “for ever a free, independent, and strictly neutral corps for the protection of the inhabitants.” After sixty years of Austrian rule there are onlj 8000 Teutons in Cracow. The town is, indeed, the very metropolis of Poland, the enduring home of the Polish national spirit. We think of Warsaw as Poland’s capital, but Warsaw is, compared with Cracow, a town of no traditions. At Cracow the Kings of Poland were crowned. In that cathedral on the rocky hill above the Vistula lie buried fet. Stanislaus, the patron saint of the Poles, and John Sobieski, who hurled back the Turks from the walls of Vienna, and Thaddeus Kosciusko, the last champion of Polish freedom, and many another national hero.

HISTORIC MEMORIES. The arcaded court of the royal castle lias memories of Casimir the Great and the line of the Jagiellos, who were kings of fanie and great achievement before the world had ever heard the name of Hapsbnrg or Hohenzol lern. Just beyond the town stands the Kosciusko Hill, a great mound raised seventy years ago by all the people of Cracow with earth taken from the famous Polish battlefields to the memory of their last champion. The university which Casimir founded is, they say, the oldest hut one in Eastern Europe. To this day it is the soul of the intellectual life of the Polish people. A CITY OF TOWERS.

The traveller, as he comes within sight of Cracow, a city rising in the middle of a rich plain, thinks of the lines about Cortona lifting to heaven “her diadem of towers.” For a thousand turrets and towers soar above Cracow. Yet it is not only by an opulence of splendour, still less by sheer grandeur, that Cracow dominates the' imagination. Z\ T o one, you may suppose, was ever awed there as many have been at Amiens or Chartres or Rheims. What gives it a special pltice in the memory is the rich, homely humanity of it all. The men who worked there may have lacked the loftiest impulses, the most tremendous aspirations, but they had a very sure hold on the common joys of life. It is a hearty vitality, a quaint humor, ; simple realism, a delight in the perfection pf craftsmanship which you enjoj at Cracow. Its art belongs, of course, to that school which has made some of the cities of Bavaria, Nuremberg, Rotlienburg, asd the rest among the treasures of civilisation. No city in Europe, not Nuremberg itself, is richer in the carvings and castings of the South German of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. South German, we say, ■hut perhaps Veit Stpss, one of the most famous of them, was himself a # 7 native of Cracow. In the richly elaboix ate high'altar of its basilica of St. Mary’s he left his masterpiece. A freer, simpler, a more appealing master than Veit Stoss also did much for the city. Among tine thousands ol visitors to Nuremberg who rejoice over the shrine of St. Sebaldus and the joyous humanity of Peter Vischer’s work, there are few who make pilgrimage to Cracow, hut Nuremberg itself might covet his brasses in St. Mary’s of Cracow or the church of the Domini, cans.

A STRATEGIC POINT. It is plain that the trade of Cracow must have been rich to foster such art as this. Like Nuremberg, its wealth and its art belong to the era just before the discovery of the ser routes to the East. When trade went overland was its golden age. But, lik< Nuremberg again, though in a less degree, it has become prosperous again in modern times. The situation which brought it wealth in peace makes it of great importance is war. It stands at the head of the navigation of the Vistula, a position of the first importance before there were railways, and still of great value. But this is not all. Cracow is built in a plain which extends along the foothills of the to the valley of the Oder. Thus it commands entry from the east to the rid industrial district of Silesia. The gap between the Sudeten Mountains and the Carpathians is the gate by which railway and road from the east to Moravia, Bohemia, and the heart of Austria itself. At the eastern opening of the gap stand the walls of Cracow. It is the headquarters of the Ist Corps of the Austrian army, and has in peace a garrison of some 10,000 men. It ranks as a fortress of the first class, and is protected by a ring of forts, but how far the works are defensible against modern artillery is not known.