Poland
Pilgrimage to Krakow, Remembrance and Reconciliation with Revd Andrew Corke and Revd Chris Tebbutt
Prices from £1,470 pp
Single Supplement £200
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Tour leader: The Revd Andrew Corke and Canon Chris Tebbutt
Download brochureKraków is one of the great cities of Central Europe, a city of extraordinary beauty, layered history and profound spiritual significance, whose streets carry the weight of centuries of human experience in a way that few places on earth can match. It is a city that has witnessed both the heights of human civilisation and its most terrible depths, and it is precisely this combination that makes a pilgrimage here unlike any other.
We begin in Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter, whose synagogues, cemeteries and narrow streets speak of a vibrant community that flourished here for centuries before being systematically destroyed. We walk through the remnants of the wartime Ghetto and visit the Enamel Factory of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist whose extraordinary moral courage saved over a thousand Jewish lives, now a powerful museum of occupation and resistance.
The pilgrimage reaches its most solemn moment with a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, where over one million human beings, the overwhelming majority of them Jewish, were murdered between 1940 and 1945. No visit to this place leaves anyone unchanged. Our visit there allows time for remembrance and reflection.
Yet Kraków is also a city of extraordinary beauty and rich heritage. The magnificent Royal Cathedral on Wawel Hill, the soaring medieval Basilica of St Mary and the vibrant Main Market Square, one of the finest in Europe, remind us that this is also a city that has long looked upward, and that faith, beauty and hope have always had the last word here.
