Park Strzelecki, Kraków

Park Strzelecki is a protected historic park in Kraków, created in eighteen thirty-seven as the Shooting Brotherhood’s headquarters and training garden. Its grounds once held a Neo-Gothic palace, range and viewing tower, and later welcomed concerts, theatre, balls and carnival festivities. Emperor Franz Joseph the First even tried, unsuccessfully, to hit the target here.

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.