Rynek Podziemny, Kraków

Rynek Podziemny is Kraków’s underground archaeological museum beneath the Main Market Square. Glass walkways reveal medieval streets and excavated remains, while multimedia displays explore the city’s trade links, daily life, and a remarkable six-hundred-and-ninety-three-kilogram block of commercial lead.

Rynek Podziemny is Kraków’s archaeological museum beneath the eastern part of the Main Market Square. The museum occupies more than six thousand square metres, including an archaeological reserve of almost four thousand square metres. Beneath the Cloth Hall, glass ramps and walkways carry visitors above medieval streets; the oldest surviving routes date to the eleventh century.

The underground story is one of a trading city tied to the Hanseatic world and other medieval European centres. Coins, pottery, ornaments, tools, hygiene items six centuries old, leather shoes, gaming bones, eastern beads and medallions, and Tatar arrowheads bring ordinary lives and long-distance exchange into view. The extraordinary heavyweight here is a six-hundred-and-ninety-three-kilogram block of commercial lead, known as the loaf.

The permanent exhibition uses projections, holograms, a water-vapour screen, and touch displays to evoke the market seven hundred years ago, including the noise of trade and the sound of buildings burning. It opened to the public on the twenty-fourth of September, twenty ten; the permanent exhibition followed three days later.