June 17,
2017 Warsaw Muzeum Narodowe (National Musuem) in Krakow & Wawel
Castle
When we
started out the weather was cool and gray, but it wasn’t raining, yet. Leonardo’s painting of the “Lady with a
Weasel” had been bought by the Czartoryski family in Krakow in 1800, and has
been in their passion since. I believe
that the painting is now part of Poland’s National Collection and that it why
it is being displayed at the National Gallery in Krakow. There is a Czartoryski Museum, but close
while be renovated. We arrived early so
there wasn’t much of a line for tickets.
They were only allowing small groups into the dimly lighted room to see
the painting. For a fairly long period
of time Sue and I were the only ones in the room. Then we started with the real fun, taking
selfies with a larger copy of the painting.
As you can see it took us awhile to find our rhythm, but our perseverance
eventually paid off, I guess.
We
then toured the rest of the museum.
There is a lot of neat art work in these museums. Then it was off to the Wawel Castle. It is located on a limestone outcrop on a
bend in the Vistula River. There has
been a structure of some kind there for centuries. It started to rain lightly when we got there,
and it was cold. We walked through the
Cathedral where photos are not allowed, thankfully. These old cathedrals are impressive
buildings. The places to get a drink or
something to eat were packed as you would imagine. We found a place to sit while we had a soda
and hoped that the rain would stop. It
eventually did stop, so we set off to see another place we had found on our
first trip. The Church of St. Francis of
Assisi has a “certified” copy of the Shroud of Turin that replica was
consecrated by Pope John Paul II at the Vatican on 19 March 2003. We just happened to find it last time, and I
wanted to see if I could find it again.
We’ll we found the church, but the chapel where it is displayed was
closed for remodeling, I think.
I
think we finished the day by purchasing tickets for tomorrow’s trip to Lancut
to see a painting on the 1001 list. I
don’t know why we didn’t see it on our last trip. My only thought is that my obsession had not
advance to its current state, and the trip would require more than taking
another train to the center of town and a short walk to the museum. We bought the train tickets and I had the
phone numbers of two taxi companies for rides from the station to the Lancut
Castle. I had emailed one of the
companies to see if they met the train at the station. They didn’t he told me to call 10-15 minutes
before the train was due to arrive. We
were all set for our trip on Monday.
Michal explained that it is pronounced Winesuit in Polish.
We
went to Mass at a church across the street from the hotel. The Church of the Transfiguration had a
Saturday Mass at 19:00. The Mass lasted
24 minutes, and there were about 30 people present. After Mass the priest was going to start a
rosary or novena at a side altar, we followed the example of some of the other
attendees, and left.
Sue
had found a Pizza place that had great reviews so we thought we see if we could
get in without reservations, short story, no we couldn’t. So we went to option #2, another Pizza place
that we passed on the way to the first.
The place was busy, but we got a table.
The pizza and the beer were great.
We
were all set for our visit with Michal to the cousins in Zembrzyce on Sunday.
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