Park Strzelecki, Kraków

Park Strzelecki is the historic municipal park around you, and it is protected as a provincial heritage site. Within its modest one-point-four-one hectares, this was once the third garden used by Kraków’s Shooting Brotherhood. The Brotherhood bought this Wesoła property, then known as the Steinkeller Garden, on the twenty-first of June eighteen thirty-seven.

Its driving force was Józef Louis, a cloth merchant and the Brotherhood’s reigning shooting king, who paid for the garden and put substantial money into its shooting range. The new headquarters opened that October. It included a Neo-Gothic little palace — a nineteenth-century revival of medieval Gothic forms — a range, and a round tower for viewing the city and its surroundings.

The palace also contained a room for concerts, theatre and meetings, so this was a social destination as much as a training ground. On the fourteenth of June eighteen fifty-five, Emperor Franz Joseph the First visited and fired three shots here, missing the target each time. Later, the palace gained a grand Shooting Hall, hosting balls, masked carnival parties and fêtes. For one season in eighteen seventy-five, the Old Theatre performed in a wooden, five-hundred-seat auditorium in the garden; on weekdays, gunfire from practice and competitions sometimes overwhelmed the actors’ voices.