CRACOW: METROPOLIS OF POLAND.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 153, 24 November 1914, Page 7

CRACOW: METROPOLIS OF POLAND.

THE RUSSIAN MARCH ON CRACOW.

There are 150,000 people in Cracow, and 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 1840 Cracow was still her own mistress, the last relic of the great Polish kingdom. Then Austria, with an enthusiasm worthy of Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, tore up the treaty by which she had guaranteed the town of Cracow "for ever a free, independent, and strictly neutral, city," and marched in an army corps "for the protection of the inhabitants." After sixty | years of Austrian rule there are only 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 St. 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 has memories of Casimir the Great and the line of the Jagiellos, who were kings of fame and great achievement before the world had ever heard of the name of Hapsburg or Hohenzollern. Just beyond the town stands, the Koscuisko Hill, a great mound raised seventy years ago by all the people of Cracow with earth taken from the famous Polish battlefield to the memory of their last champion. The University which Casimir founded is, they say, the oldest but 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 lie 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 Gothic turrets and towers soar above Cracow. Yet it is not by an opulence of splendour, still less by sheer grandeur, that Cracow dominates the imagination. Sfo one, you may suppose, was ever awed there as . as many have been at Amiens or Chatres or Rheims. What gives it a special place in the memory is the homely humanity of it all. The men who worked there, may have lacked tha loftiest impulses, the most tremendous aspirations, but they have had a very sure hold, on the common joys of life. Tt is a liearty vitality, a quaint humor, a simple realism-, a delight in the perfection of craftmansliip which you enjoy at Cracow. Its art belongs, of course, to that school which has made some of the cities of Bavaria, Nuremburg, Bothenburg, and the rest among the treasures of civilisation. \o city in Europe, not Xuremburg itself, is richer in the carvings and castings of the South German masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. South German, we say, but perhap? Vict Stoss, one of the most famous of them, was himself a native of Cracow. In the richly elaborate high altar of its basilica of St. Mary's lie left his masterpiece. A freer, simpler, a more appealing master than Viet Stoss also did much for the city. Among the thousands of visitors to Nuremburg who rejoice over the shrine of St. Sehaldus and the joyous humanity of Peter Vischcr's work, there are a few who make pilgrimage to Cracow, but Xuremburg itself might covet bis brasses in St. 'Mary's of Cracow or ' the Church of the Dominicans.

A STRATEGIC POINT. - It is plain that the trade of Cracow > must have been rich to foster such art 1 as this. Like Nuremburg, its art and j wealth belong to the era just before the discovery of the sen routes to the. East. When trade went overland, was its golden age. But like Nuremburg again, though in a less degree, it has iineorne prosperous again in modern times. \The situation wliieh brought it wealth in peace makes it of great importance in 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 valut. But this is not all. Cracow is built in a plain which extends along the foothills of the. Carpathians to the wall of the Oder. Thus it commands entry from the oast to the rich industrial plains of Silesia. The gap between the Sudeten mountains and the Carpathians is the gap by which the railway and road run 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 first corps of the Austrian Army, and has in police 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 unknown.