Plock Old Town

Plock sits on a bluff fifty metres above the Vistula, and in the twelfth century it was for a while the seat of Polish rulers - Wladyslaw Herman and Boleslaw Krzywousty are both buried in the cathedral here, in a sarcophagus in the nave, which makes this one of only a handful of Polish royal burial sites. The cathedral is Romanesque in origin, from the 1130s, much altered, and its most famous object is not there: the Plock Door, a set of twelfth-century bronze panels cast in Magdeburg, which left the city in the Middle Ages and is now in Novgorod, so what hangs here is a copy made in the 1980s. The diocesan museum on the hill has a serious treasury. Below the escarpment the Vistula runs wide, and the town above it has an Art Nouveau centre - Plock had a prosperous turn of the twentieth century and the Mazovian Museum holds the largest collection of Polish Art Nouveau in the country.

What you actually see

• The cathedral of the 1130s - Romanesque origins under later rebuilding.
• Two rulers' tomb - Wladyslaw Herman and Boleslaw Krzywousty in the nave.
• A copy of the Plock Door - the twelfth-century bronze original has been in Novgorod for centuries.
• Poland's largest Art Nouveau collection - in the Mazovian Museum below the hill.

When to go

April to October. A day.

Honest expectations

The cathedral closes to visitors during services. The famous bronze door here is a modern copy and the fact is not always made obvious. The town is a working industrial centre and the refinery is visible from parts of the escarpment.

Nearby

The Vistula escarpment path runs along the bluff; Torun is downstream.