Old Synagogue

In front of you is the Stara Synagoga, the oldest surviving synagogue building in Poland. Its exact date is disputed: depending on the source, it was built at some point in the 15th century, anywhere from the start to the end of that century. What we do know is that a fire badly damaged it in 1557 and that the Italian architect Matteo Gucci rebuilt it in Renaissance style in 1570.

1A fortress synagogue

Gucci gave it the look you see: thick walls, massive buttresses, high windows and a top pierced with openings like a battlement. It was the religious and communal centre of Jewish Kazimierz; in the 17th century, prayer rooms for women were added, the low wings on the façade.

2Kościuszko and the war

In 1794, during the uprising against Russia and Prussia, Tadeusz Kościuszko spoke here to ask for the support of the Jewish population; a plaque marks the event. Under the German occupation, the synagogue was desecrated, looted and used as a warehouse, and in 1943 the Germans shot thirty Polish hostages against its wall.

Before the war, around 60,000 Jews lived in Kraków, nearly a quarter of the population. The vast majority were murdered in the Holocaust. Restored between 1956 and 1959, the synagogue has been a branch of the Museum of Kraków since 1958, devoted to the history and culture of the city's Jews.

The building survived; the community that prayed in it, almost entirely, did not.

3What to look for

• The blind arches along the top of the brick wall, from the 1570 rebuilding.
• The buttresses that give the building its fortress-like air.
• The stone wall to the left, a remnant of the district's old defences.