Floriańska, Kraków

Floriańska is a three-hundred-and-thirty-five-metre Old Town street connecting Kraków’s Main Market Square and St. Florian’s Gate. Part of the Royal Road since the 1257 rebuilding plan, it is lined with historic townhouses, including Hotel Pod Różą and the relief-decorated house known as “Under the Moors.”

Floriańska is Kraków’s historic street linking the Main Market Square with St. Florian’s Gate, a route only three hundred and thirty-five metres long but packed with centuries of city life. It belongs to the Royal Road, the ceremonial way through Kraków, and it has formed part of the Old Town’s orderly street plan since 1257.

That plan was laid out after the Mongol assault of 1241 devastated the city. The gate at the street’s far end gives Floriańska its name and points toward the church of Saint Florian. For more than seven hundred years the street has kept that name, even as its houses changed.

Medieval Gothic homes were reshaped in Renaissance, Baroque, and later fashions; restoration work has uncovered blocked doorways, painted ceilings, and Gothic cellars beneath them. At number one, the corner of the first floor carries a sixteenth-century relief of two African figures, preserving the name of the house “Under the Moors.” Further along, number fourteen is Hotel Pod Różą, where Franz Liszt and Tsar Alexander the First stayed.

Floriańska began as an address for prosperous townspeople and nobles, then filled with inns, hotels, restaurants, and museums from the late eighteenth century onward. Even the horse tram that first ran here in 1882 became an electric line in 1901.