Easter in Poland

Saturs pieejams arī latviski

Poland is a big country, one of the largest in the European Union. Usually, we have been crossing it as a transit country, however, there are many places in Poland worth visiting. One day, we decided to see how people celebrate Easter in Poland.

Here are notes of our trip made during the Easter Holidays in 2010. This time for the trip was chosen because the majority of Polish people as very active Catholics and visit churches and celebrate Easter according to their traditions every year. Some sites we visited for that reason were of religious character.

City of Krakow

We went to Krakow which is one of the oldest cities in Poland and is located in the Lesser Poland region famous for its architecture, and religious and cultural heritage. Since 1978, the old town of Krakow has been on the list of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Sites.

Also, Krakow is the second largest city in Poland with many beautiful sites for visitors. For example, Old Town (Stare Miasto), Wawel Castle, St. Andrew’s Church and the district of Kazimierz. Kraków has also been the royal capital of Poland for many centuries.

Although Easter is a very busy time in Krakow, we managed to get an apartment for short-term rent in the heart of the old town, just two hundred metres from the Main Market Square.

To book our apartment, we used the services of booking.com as usual. I am mentioning this here because shortly before arrival, we found out that our booked apartment was already occupied.

I immediately contacted customer services at booking.com and after a few hours this incident was solved – we got even better rooms and conditions than initially! This was the first incident of such kind with this company and I am really satisfied with how quickly it was handled.

Easter Celebration

Our main goal was to see how they celebrate Easter. On Saturday afternoon we went to a church. There were lots of local people. It was interesting to see that, according to the local traditions, people carried to the church small baskets with eggs and other components of breakfast (they call it a “blessing basket”). The basket was put down on the table in the church and consecrated by a pastor.

After the service, people took their baskets and went home waiting for Easter morning to consume the content of the “blessing basket”; the family breakfast is an important part of the Easter celebration in Poland. To be honest, I never saw this kind of action before and it was really amazing to experience. Just to add that the taste of our breakfast basket eggs was excellent.

During those two days in Krakow, we enjoyed the festive atmosphere on the Main Market Square, booked a horse cart for sightseeing, tasted many different sweets, and local beer (for sure, it was better than wine offered in local pubs), visited Wawel Castle and other sites of historical centre of Krakow.