Toruń

I think my cousin Alicja purposely saved one of the best for the last. Or maybe it’s just that my last impressions of Poland are the most remembered on. But on my last full day in Poland, we visited the historic city of Toruń, and walked around that wonderful city for several hours.

You can see my pictures from Toruń here: http://poland.leonkonieczny.com/Poland%202011/Toruń/index.html. And if you’d like the longer version of its history, read the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toru%C5%84.

We arrived in Toruń around 11 in the morning and parked just inside the old fortress walls. In the first number of pictures, you can see the walls, and later on too. Somewhere in the middle is a picture of a sign that shows what the fortified city looked like long ago.

What you see in the center of the city is a very vibrant city with a nice square that has a lot of merchants. Since it was late summer, there were a lot of fruits and vegetables available. But around the square and on a few of the main streets approaching it, there were many, many shops filled with all sorts of merchandise. We even managed to secure a nice Lego set and a child’s guitar for Filip there.

There are also a few very old and distinctive churches in some of the photos. One of the little known fact about Toruń is that, post-reformation, it had a protestant government. Keep in mind that Poland was very tolerant of the Reformation, unlike Spain and France. Poland was always very welcoming of other religious elements, and some reformers prospered in Toruń.

One of Toruń’s biggest claims to fame is that it is the birthplace of the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus (in Polish, Mikołaj Kopernik). Copernicus is the famous astronomer who first proved that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

Toruń today is a very modern city of about 200,000 people. It is a very nice city and has won a number of awards as a nice place to live and work. You really should read the Wikipedia article above to learn more about Toruń.