Guided tour

Guided Tour

Guided by: Magdalena Worłowska

The entrance fee is not a ticket. The ticket should be purchased on the day of the tour in the box office of the ICC Gallery.(ticket prices: regular - 15 PLN, concessionary - 10 PLN, family - 20 PLN, pensioners over 70 - free admission)

About exhibition:

When, by Adolf Hitler's decision, Krakow was designated the capital of the General Government and recognised as an ancient German city, it became the site of a unique experiment involving reconstruction and symbolic appropriation of space. This is one of the tragic and little-researched chapters in the history of the city. For many years, this story remained untold - in the times of the Polish People's Republic, the subject was ignored by researchers and banned by censorship.The exhibition showcases urban and infrastructural plans, including the most important architectural designs and their implementations, which were to change the pre-war Polish city into a model Stadt Krakau. Krakow was to become the easternmost bridgehead of the Thousand-Year Reich and, as the capital of the General Government, it was to receive a new urban design. Architecture was also used as a tool of brutal and bloody policies aimed at the city and its inhabitants. Polish elites, cultural and scientific institutions were crushed, and works of art were plundered. Monuments and Polish national symbols were destroyed, and the names of squares and streets were changed to German ones. The swastikas were omnipresent in the public space, and Nazi propaganda was streaming from the street loudspeakers.Architecture played an important role in the execution of the Shoah as well. Krakow is the only city in the world where the Nazis set up a concentration camp - KL Plaszow. It was deliberately located on the site of two Jewish cemeteries, just several kilometres from the centre modernised by the occupation authorities.

The exhibition can be visited until 5 June, 2022.