Wawel

Now available in PDF format. DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Poland is your indispensable guide to this beautiful country. The fully updated guide includes unique cutaways, floor plans, and reconstructions of the must-see sights, plus street-by-street maps of cities and towns. DK's insider travel tips and essential local information will help you discover the best of this country region-by-region, from local festivals and markets to day trips around the countryside. Detailed listings will guide you to hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops for all budgets, while practical information will help you to get around by train, bus, or car. With hundreds of full-color photographs, hand-drawn illustrations, and custom maps that brighten every page, DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Poland truly shows you this destination as no one else can.

Imagine traveling from Tallin, Krakow, and Prague right through to Budapest, Dubrovnik, and Ljubljana. This beautifully illustrated guide to Eastern and Central Europe takes you to every city, national park, castle, church, cathedral and museum worth seeing across Eastern and Central Europe. For each of the 17 countries it covers, it suggests good hotels and restaurants, explains how to get around, and maps the major cities and towns. If you are one of those people who wants to see it all, this is the guide for you: it includes over 2,000 color photographs, maps, and illustrations. Countries covered: Austria (Vienna), Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia.

DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Poland is your in-depth guide to the very best of Poland. Whether exploring the liveliness of its big cities or taking in the natural beauty of its idyllic lakes, beaches and mountains, you will experience the culture of Eastern hospitality and community values of this land that is deeply rooted in tradition and history. With hundreds of full-color photographs, hand-drawn illustrations, and custom maps that illuminate every page, DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Poland truly shows you this country as no one else can.

On 10 April 2010, Polish President Lech Kaczyński and First Lady Maria Kaczyńska were killed in an airplane crash outside the city of Smolensk in western Russia, where they were flying to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet massacre of over twenty-one thousand Polish prisoners during the Second World War. Eight days later, the president and his wife were laid to rest beneath the Krakow Cathedral on Wawel Hill, an ancient necropolis of Polish kings and queens and the most prestigious burial site in all of Poland, where only six other meritorious, non-royal national figures have been enshrined since the demise of the Polish monarchy in the late eighteenth century. The decision to bury Lech and Maria Kaczyński in Poland’s highest national pantheon sparked an emotional debate about its symbolic appropriateness and underscored the question of how such burial decisions are actually made. It also raised a whole host of questions about the historical significance and pantheonic function of Wawel—the “bedrock of sacred memory for the Polish nation,” as Stanisław Staszic put it in the early nineteenth century—in modern Polish consciousness. Until now, these questions have received surprisingly little attention beyond Polish historians of Krakow. Here All Is Poland excavates and builds upon the extant scholarly discourse of Wawel to plot the evolution of a pantheonic funeral tradition over two hundred years, thus providing a context and a clue for interpreting the historical significance of the 2010 burial.