Nóż, Kraków

The Nóż is an iron replica suspended on a chain beneath the vault of Kraków’s Cloth Hall. It recalls a local legend of two brothers building St Mary’s towers, in which jealousy, murder and remorse explain the towers’ unequal heights. The current knife replaces an earlier object repeatedly lost over time.

Suspended from a chain beneath the Cloth Hall vault, the Knife is an iron replica hanging in the passage across the building’s shorter axis. No one knows when the first knife was placed here. Local legend gives it a grim meaning.

In the reign of Duke Bolesław the Chaste, two brothers were building the towers of St Mary’s Church. The younger discovered that his tower would not reach the height of his older brother’s. Envy led him to murder his brother with this knife, and guilt then drove him to jump from the taller tower.

The blade was hung as a warning against brothers destroying one another; the same tale explains why St Mary’s two towers differ so strikingly in height. The object you see now is not the original but a replacement. During the Second World War, Germans were believed to have taken the knife as an example of an ancient Germanic weapon, and after the war visitors repeatedly stole its replacements.