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Krakow represents great history, great monuments but also great industry which itself became a monument of past times. Communism left behind it a gigantic steel mill, with Nowa Huta, ideal city of the era, today constituting the other part of Krakow, which grew next to it. A wheel once set in motion never stops, the steel mill through modernising entered the new millennium.
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The light of kerosene lamp. Soundless fire, delicate, controlled, bright. Today it is hard to remember, but its light witnessed the lives of a few generations. Malopolska is its… cradle. It was here that Ignacy Łukasiewicz, future constructor of the lamp, at the end of 1852 and beginning of 1853, distilled kerosene for the first time, using local oil deposits and at the same time started the greatest industry, fundamental to the contemporary world. Today Poland produces minimum amounts of oil, but the pumps are still there, standing in the fields of Malopolska. It all started here.
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Belgians know best that beer is a ritual. Monks of the Malopolska Szczyrzyc know that too, having produced beer since the 13th c.; so do the dwellers of Brzesko, where a pleasant scent of malt can be smelled around the old brewery of Okocim, one of the best in Poland. This ritual means also the sound of de-bunging, prelude to beer-lovers’ delight, the sound of air sucked into the barrel and eventually, the sound of pouring beer. Malopolska invites you. With or without the froth?
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There is no greater hit: everyone in Poland knows this tune, for dozens of years it has been played on the radio, and every hour it can be heard over the Krakow Market Square: the bugler plays it to the four corners of the world from the tower top of St Mary’s Church, the city’s representative temple. The tune of St Mary’s bugle call breaks off abruptly: legend has it that during the Tartar invasion of the city, in the early Middle Ages, when a watchman played the bugle to warn the city of imminent danger, a Tartar arrow pierced his throat half-note.