Tarnow Old Town

Tarnow has the highest average temperature of any Polish city, which the town uses as a slogan, and a market square that was rebuilt in the sixteenth century after a fire into something unusually coherent: a brick town hall in the middle with a Renaissance attic parapet of carved masks and a Gothic tower under it, ringed by burgher houses with arcades on the north side. The cathedral off the square holds two very large Renaissance tomb monuments of the Tarnowski family, among the tallest of their kind in Europe. The town was roughly half Jewish before the war and the traces are deliberate rather than incidental: the bimah of the seventeenth-century synagogue stands alone in a small square, the roof and walls gone, kept as it was found. Tarnow also holds the main Polish museum of Roma history and culture, the only permanent one of its kind in the country, with painted wagons in the garden.

What you actually see

• The arcaded town hall - Renaissance parapet of carved masks over a Gothic tower.
• Tarnowski tomb monuments - among the tallest Renaissance tombs in Europe.
• The standing bimah - all that remains of the old synagogue, left open to the sky.
• The Roma museum - the only permanent collection of its kind in Poland.

When to go

April to October. A day.

Honest expectations

Museums here keep short hours and close on Mondays. The Roma museum is small. The old town is compact and can be walked in a couple of hours; the rest of the city is ordinary.

Nearby

Zalipie, the painted village, is about thirty kilometres north.