Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Krakow has earned an international reputation as the epicenter of cultural life in Poland—thanks in no small part to generous public funding and, bizarrely, the success of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Over the past fifteen years, the city has rediscovered its Jewish and bohemian identities; while the former Jewish quarter of Kazimierz is now teeming with jazz clubs, cafes and reconstructed relics of Jewish culture, the city as a whole has become an amalgam of a dark past and bright future.
07:15 AM
Coffee AT kolory cafE ul. estery 10, Kazimierz
Krakow is small, so most of the cafes in the Old Town are filled with tourists who pop in for a quick coffee and then move on. Kolory is a different story. When I want to meet up with somebody in the morning, I almost always do it there. Even though I don’t drink coffee, the rich and pleasant smell of espresso fills the entire 86
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place. I usually stick to the French style breakfast, which is good for something small and sweet on the cheap. If you take a look at the walls, every photo and every picture is some reference to Paris, which somehow fits the neighborhood’s Bohemian aesthetic. Poles actually don’t eat breakfast out, so the only reason they offer it in Kolory is because it’s also a B&B. Like so many bars and cafes in Kazimierz, it only opened up a few years ago. But it doesn’t feel new in a bad way . . . There used to be almost no young people in the area—only boarded-up buildings and sketchy-looking guys milling about. But after the fall of the Iron Curtain, more and more people started coming to the Jewish quarter, and everything changed really, really fast. Kolory is a perfect place to take it all in slowly—that is, until night falls. When the bar’s full, shouting is the only way to have a conversation Radek Szczesniak PR and Programming, Unsound Festival