Wolnica Square

Wolnica Square occupies what remains of Kazimierz's former market. Kazimierz Town Hall now stands at the western edge, although it once stood in the middle of a much larger trading space. Around it were cloth and cobblers' stalls, rows for salt, bread, and meat, and the city's weighing scales. On Saturdays, butchers who were not members of the local guild were allowed to trade outside the official stalls. Such a day of free trade was called wolnica. The freedom in the square's name refers precisely to this trading rule.

A bronze relief hangs on the eastern wall of the town hall: a group of Jews approaches the city wall; one man has gone down on one knee and holds a Torah scroll, while a crowned female figure reaches out her hand to him. This bronze appeared here after an almost thirty-year attempt to erect a completely different monument in the square.

In eighteen eighty-three, the initiative was put forward by progressive Krakow Jews—a small group that advocated for Jews' participation in Polish civic and cultural life. The Polish state did not exist at the time, Krakow was part of Austria-Hungary, and a public monument to a Polish king was a statement of belonging to Polish society. Kazimierz III the Great was chosen because, in thirteen thirty-four, he confirmed and extended throughout the whole kingdom the legal guarantees previously granted to Jews. Kazimierz itself bore his name, and Jewish children had already been studying in the former Kazimierz Town Hall for many years.

The initiators wanted to pay for the monument solely through Jewish donations. A bronze figure of the king was to stand on a granite plinth, with four reliefs below about Jewish history, from the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem to their reception in Poland. Money was collected through a lottery and donation boxes in shops and private homes. The writer Aniela Korngut, secretary of the women's committee, gave the proceeds from a story printed especially for the monument. Yet eight years after the fundraising began, the committee had only about a third of the necessary sum. Committees dissolved and were formed again, designs replaced one another, but the king never appeared in the square.

In the end, the money collected was enough for one of the planned reliefs. The commission went to the young Jewish sculptor Henryk Hochman. On May fifth, nineteen eleven, the city council permitted his work to be set into the town hall, and on November fifteenth it was unveiled with the inscription: “In memory of Kazimierz III the Great—Jewish Poles.”

The meeting depicted at the city gates is an allegory, not a documented scene that took place in this square. It soon caused a dispute among Krakow's Jews themselves. Supporters of Zionism saw the future in a state of their own and considered the kneeling figure humiliating. Their newspaper praised Hochman's skill but called the content of the relief compromising. The commemorative marker, conceived as a statement on behalf of the community, revealed how differently its members understood their own place in Polish society.

During the German occupation, the plaque was removed; its subsequent fate is unknown, and it was most likely destroyed. In nineteen eighty-nine, another bronze relief by Hochman, cast around nineteen oh seven, was found in the storage collections of the National Museum in Warsaw. Researchers still cannot determine whether it was an early version, an exact copy, or the very work that had been removed. In nineteen ninety-six, the found bronze was returned to the town hall. The original relief was on the northern wall; the current one is installed on the eastern wall, facing Wolnica Square.