Ogród Profesorski, Kraków

At Jagiellońska 17, Ogród Profesorski is a compact, roughly 0.15-hectare university garden on Kraków’s Old Town. It lies in a tight pocket between the Jagiellonian University’s historic college buildings and the Planty park belt. This patch of green has served the university since at least 1467, when its orchard and vegetable beds supplied the professors’ dining hall at Collegium Maius.

Eight years later, it even acquired an enclosure for poultry. The garden’s fortunes changed sharply. Once professors had left the college, it fell into neglect in the late eighteenth century and became a storeyard for building materials.

University botanists reclaimed it late in the nineteenth century, cultivating three hundred plant species, but the construction of Collegium Witkowskiego took away much of the space in 1908. The present garden dates from its restoration in 2009 and 2010. Notice the stone professors in academic gowns and caps: they are nineteenth-century sculptures, yet nobody knows whom they portray. Two stone halberdiers guard the entrance, while five hands-on scientific models mark chapters in the university’s history—from a sundial and armillary sphere to equipment connected with the university’s first cyclotron and cosmic-ray measurement.