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03.05.04, 22:47
Krakow Is Eastern Europe's Party Place
By SCOTT NORVELL
Published: May 2, 2004
FOR someone in search of night life, there can be no better sign than
sidewalks that literally hum. Traipsing along Grodzka Street in Krakow one
evening, my wife, Shelley, and I thought we were hallucinating. A muffled
thumping and a hazy green glow radiated from what appeared to be a glass
trapdoor in the sidewalk. The doorways in the area were all dark.
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Turning the corner, we spotted a dark portal at the bottom of a set of stairs.
When we opened the door, a wave of the same green haze and bass-heavy house
techno washed over us.
We had stumbled across Prozak, one of Krakow's hottest dance clubs. The touch
of hedonism hidden behind the somber facade of Dominikanska Street was a sign
of things to come.
Krakow is like two cities. It is quiet and reserved by day. But by night its
basements are crammed with overheated night owls shaking off their stoicism.
Jazz oozes from the dark corners of alleys of the Stare Miasto, the Old Town,
and cabaret echoes through its Gothic cellars.
Smoky cafes are full of brooding patrons, and the walls of Kazimierz, one of
Europe's major centers of Jewish culture until World War II, are plastered
with flyers promising live muzyka and poetry readings. If Prague was the
coolest city in Eastern Europe during the 1990's, then Krakow is well on its
way to capturing the title this decade.
The Hotel Copernicus, our home for the weekend, exemplifies the new standards
of style in the city. The 14th-century property has the chic minimalism of an
Ian Schrager establishment, but without the pretentious bellhops and would-be
models in the lobby.
Its 29 rooms are furnished in dark hardwoods and Oriental rugs, and the
bathrooms are immaculate, with huge tubs and heated marble floors. The walls
of the suites are adorned with 16th-century frescoes, and all the rooms are
clustered around a three-story atrium topped by a terrace garden lying in the
shadow of Krakow's most famous monument, the Renaissance Wawel Castle. The
hotel is just two blocks from the most famous feature of Krakow's skyline, the
spires of the thousand-year-old Wawel Cathedral and the palace-castle
combination cluttering the small hill with it.
The Wawel Castle harks back to the day when Krakow was capital, both cultural
and political, of Poland. Its monarchs ruled a city that, from between 16th to
the 18th centuries, was one of medieval superlatives, with the best
universities, the largest square and the finest Renaissance and Baroque
architecture in the region. However, our aim in going to Krakow was not to
dally around the tourist spots. We were there to sample the night life of a
city that is quickly gaining the reputation as party central in Eastern
Europe. Residents of this city of 800,000 like to brag that they have more
watering holes per square foot than any other place in Europe, and after
spending a long weekend there in December I'm inclined to agree.
Within hours of arriving, we were perched in the windowsill of the Cafe
Camelot on Tomasza Street nibbling on salads drizzled in chive-and-basil
yogurt and watching patrons with furrowed brows chatter about what looked to
be very serious subjects. Black-clad waitresses squeezed between the tiny
tables carrying slices of what is said to be the best cheesecake in town. It
did not disappoint.
Throughout the meal, laughter and applause came from behind a black velvet
curtain draped across a stairway at the back of the dining room. Behind the
curtain was Loch Camelot, one of the city's more renowned cabaret and jazz
clubs. The troupe of six on stage that night was belting out Polish songs that
seemed to delight an audience parked on folded chairs beneath a low ceiling of
arched bricks.
Nearby, at Stalowe Magnolie (Steel Magnolia), a young woman was covering
American hits in a heavy Polish accent. Neither of us had heard Sister Sledge
and Roberta Flack vocals accompanied by horns, but the combination worked.
Young women in the packed audience were shimmying around at their tables under
the longing eyes of the boys at the back of the room.(Page 2 of 3)
Revelers who have a little too much fun at night will find getting home easier
in Krakow than in most old European cities. The narrow streets of the compact
Old Town are laid out in a Manhattan-like grid rare for this part of the
world. That's a good thing, because they are often thronged with tourists
marching from the stalls of amber jewelry and wool slippers in the Cloth Hall
to St. Mary's Basilica for the hourly blowing of the half-finished trumpet
blare known as the Hejnal, an exercise commemorating the day in 1241 when one
such bugler was shot in the throat by invading Tatar archers.
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For lunch, we ended up at Osorya, near Jagiellonian University, a 630-year-old
institution where Copernicus once studied, now hidden behind a late-Gothic
facade. Down two flights of stairs and in a warren of dining rooms, two lonely
waiters stood guard over a scene awash in red velour and white lace. We were
the only customers for half an hour until a family struggled out of their
coats and ordered a bottle of vodka.
Soft Polish music purred in the background, fitting for what was described as
traditional local fare - dumplings for Shelley and bigos, a sausage and
sauerkraut mishmash souped up with red wine, onions and garlic, for me. Dense
brown bread and caraway butter was abundant, but the place was stingy with the
wine. According to the menu, each glass got exactly 10 centiliters, or about
seven tablespoons, of red wine.
We made our way back through the main square to a fresh hole in the wall
dubbed Vodka for a taste of Poland's most famous tipple.
Everyone told us to try Zubrowka, a vodka infused with bison grass that was
banned in America at one time because of its alleged psychotropic properties.
It's smooth and slightly sweet - tasty, in fact - but reports of its
mind-bending properties are overblown. Poles tend to drink it with apple juice
in a concoction they call tatanka.
That evening, we ventured southeast of the Old Town to Kazimierz. The
500-year-old neighborhood, one of Europe's oldest Jewish enclaves, came to
general attention in the 1990's as the setting for Steven Spielberg's movie
"Schindler's List." It is said to have changed little since the end of World
War II, when the invading Nazis corralled some 17,000 of its residents into a
nearby ghetto and then, two years later, shipped almost all of them off to
concentration camps. Nearly all perished.
The quarter was largely neglected until Mr. Spielberg came along. Now, the
roughly 12-square-block area has been largely restored for the benefit of
tourists, and local entrepreneurs have turned its former shopfronts and small
workshops into the newest preserve for Krakow's party animals.
On damp evenings, all of Kazimierz's cobbled streets shine with reflected neon
beer signs and cafe lights. On Miodowa Street, Propaganda's turns the sidewalk
red in a none-too-subtle dig at the old ways. Communist kitsch like the grill
of a Trabant automobile, photos of Stalin and clunky old consumer electronics
graces the walls, and living throwbacks to the earlier era perch on the wobbly
barstools. The night we popped in, a crusty old man in worn clothing accosted
us with praise for "great America." Rare sentiments in Europe these days.
For dinner, we went for traditional over trendy. The menu at Klezmer Hois,
heavy on fish and eggs, probably hasn't changed much since World War II
either. We munched on fish balls, Viennese schnitzel and chicken drizzled with
a honey-ginger sauce as a string quartet played in the main dining room.
A cafe crawl around Kazimierz rounded out the evening. At Aloha, we found a
bizarre attempt to import a Hawaiian-theme bar to a medieval setting. Fau
