Perfectly Goth in Krakow...

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a bit of a closet Goth. Have been even before it was popular to be “Goth”, starting when I was 6 and convinced all my friends that I was a werewolf, and scared them out of their skins on a camping trip. My favorite period of literature is the 1800’s, and my favorite authors include Bram Stoker, Mary Shelly, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gaston Lereaux and Emily Bronte for their contributions to the wonderful quest in consideration of various “monsters” and what “makes them such”. Having said all that, I set about from Terrible’s place to see what I could see in Krakow, and within a very short amount of time, was having the time of my life in a perfectly gothic scene that words will scarcely do justice to paint.

For starters, it was gray, overcast, about 55 degrees [still] and drizzling slightly. My favorite kind of weather. As I proceeded down the narrow, cobble-stone laden streets, there were beautiful churches (each of which ranging in age from 700 to 300 years old), ornate buildings complete with delicately crafted buttresses, pylons and molding, heavily wooded parks peppered with lovers and loners out walking their dogs, and a general but comfortable “busyness” that was neither frantic nor completely idle.

On my way, I noticed a very out of place little shop called “Inter-book”, and wondered if they might have a copy in English of Stoker’s Dracula. You see, as much as I had hoped that my faded copy would make it through the journey, it began to fall apart terribly shortly after Munich. Not wanting to damage it further, I resolved to pick up another copy as soon as possible. Anyway, I stopped into Interbook and asked the young lady at the counter if she spoke English. She responded perfectly that she did, and when I asked her if she had a copy of Stoker on hand, she smiled, and then pointed me to the far wall. As it turns out, Interbook is a distributor for Penguin Books (a mass-marketer press house that often provides low cost classics), and had shelves and shelves of all the classics I mentioned above, and pretty much everything else I could think of. But no Stoker. I started to panic, but then the lady bent down and began rummaging through their stock drawers, each of which was located in a cabinet underneath each shelf. Eventually, she smiled broadly and brought out a copy. She said, “Ah-ha…there he was, hiding in the dark. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. It is Dracula after all… he doesn’t like the sunlight.” I laughed, paid 5Z for the book, and left the store feeling even happier and…yes… even more goth than I had started.

Another mile or so from Interbook, I stumbled onto the “main market square” of Krakow, which is actually the converted inner workings of the city’s formidable castle structure, and so set about walking the various in-roads, passing more shops and fun little restaurants, until I found myself in the middle of …well, what I actually discovered is the largest central market square in all of Europe. It was beautiful, and you could buy pretty much every kind of souvenir you could think of in any of the myriad number of little shops. There were even lots of “open air” restaurants either cooking fun Polish cuisine over open flames (see following post titled “Now THAT’S a Grill!”) or serving diners at outside bistros. Horse-drawn carriages awaited anyone who wanted a ride (for a small fee), and a 700 year old church of immense dimensions stood sentinel at the far end. I looked until my heart was content, and then headed down the side-streets again to the outside in order to look around the outer grounds.

The outer grounds proved even more breathtaking, with tree canopy covered walkways, beautiful flower gardens, and sculpted fountains, not to mention the sound of distant thunder as the rain picked up and sent people scurrying under newspapers or twirling their umbrellas all throughout. As I began to stalk the outer walkway, the twilight dimmed the pavement to a near black as rain spackled through the tree leaves and then fell klitter-klatter onto the dark asphalt, but only five minutes before all visibility was gone, rows of Narnia-esque street lamps glittered to life all around, as if by magic (sorry…too much Harry Potter lately). I continued on around until finally reaching the far end of the castle’s exterior, and then turned around to come home, thoroughly delighted with all that I had experienced.

But as I reached Szewski St (one of the main in-roads to the market castle) to make my way back to Terrible’s, the treetops above me erupted suddenly in the massive din of what must have been thousands upon thousands of ravens. They called to each other, flew from branch to branch, shaking the branches and dropping heavy sheets of collected rain upon all of us who walked below, and grew louder and louder as more and more ravens flocked to the meeting point. By the time I began to leave their symphony, I estimate that there were 10,000 ravens in the trees above me. I actually called Sami just so she could hear the colossal explosion of noise, and she could even hear it through the phone as I held it out at arm’s length.

So that was my spectacularly gothic evening. In a thousand year old European city with a castle in the echoing thunder of the splashing rain under the canopy of ancient trees and lamplit walkways while ravens serenaded in a cacophony of nearly other-worldly fervor from overhead. Rapturous!