Poland in a Nutshell

At Kraków airport (KRK) your private chauffeur meets you and drives you inside the green Planty ring to the Hotel Copernicus, the oldest house on Kanonicza street, directly below Wawel Hill. In the late afternoon your guide walks you out into the Main Market Square, the largest medieval square in Europe and still the working centre of the city rather than a preserved one. You hear the hejnał, the trumpet call from the tower of St Mary's that stops mid-note every hour, and your guide tells you why it does. Kraków came through the war without being bombed flat, which is the single fact that explains the difference between this city and the one you finish in. Dinner is under the vaults of a fourteenth-century cellar off the square.

You begin on Wawel Hill, two minutes from the hotel door, with a private, guided visit to the royal castle and cathedral at the day's first entry slot. This was the seat of Polish kings for five hundred years and the place they were crowned and buried, and walking it early with a historian rather than in a queue is the difference between seeing a monument and understanding one. In the afternoon you walk across the old town to the Czartoryski Museum for a pre-booked timed slot in front of Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, one of only a handful of surviving Leonardo paintings, arranged to keep the wait as short as the museum allows. The remainder of the day is left open on purpose; the square is worth sitting in.

The morning belongs to Kazimierz, a separate town for four hundred years and home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe until 1941. Your specialist walks you through its surviving synagogues, the old cemetery and the courtyards most visitors pass without noticing, and is straightforward about both what happened here and what the quarter has become since. In the afternoon you drive twenty minutes out to Wieliczka and descend into a salt mine worked continuously from the thirteenth century until the 1990s. A hundred and one metres down is the Chapel of St Kinga, a full-sized church with altarpieces, floor reliefs and chandeliers all carved from rock salt by miners in their own time. Further into the mine, in a private chamber among the salt-carved walls, a table is set for dinner.

After breakfast you travel north to Warsaw and check into the Hotel Bristol on the Royal Route, the city's grande dame since 1901. In the afternoon your historian walks you into the old town, and the point of arriving from Kraków is that the contrast lands immediately. Ninety percent of Warsaw was destroyed by 1945. The old town you are standing in was rebuilt through the 1950s using Bernardo Bellotto's eighteenth-century cityscapes as working drawings, down to the window mouldings, and your guide shows you where the seams are and what was deliberately left out. It is a reconstruction, it is UNESCO-listed precisely because of that, and it is a different kind of impressive from the one you spent three days in.

The morning goes to the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which tells the story of the sixty-three days in 1944 when the city rose, was not relieved, and was then systematically destroyed in reprisal. It is a dense museum and it is far better walked with a historian who can tell you where to spend your attention. In the afternoon you cross to the Royal Łazienki, the park the last Polish king built for himself, with a palace standing on its own island in a lake and peacocks with the run of the grounds. In the evening a pianist plays an hour of Chopin for you privately in a salon rather than a concert hall, which is close to the setting this music was written for.

The morning is spent in a working kitchen with a city chef, making pierogi by hand, which is harder than it looks and improves quickly once someone shows you the fold. It comes with a tasting of Polish vodkas, which are meant to be drunk cold and neat rather than mixed into anything, and you eat what you have made. In the afternoon you cross the Vistula to Praga, the district on the east bank that the Red Army reached first and that therefore was never destroyed. Its pre-war tenement courtyards, brick factories and shrines are the oldest continuously standing part of the city, which is a strange thing to say about the least polished part of it. It has become where the studios and the good bars are.

Breakfast is unhurried, and depending on your flight there is usually time for a last walk down the Royal Route, or an hour in the Łazienki if the weather is with you. Your chauffeur then drives you out to Warsaw airport (WAW) and sees you to the terminal, closing a week that began under a castle that was never touched and ends in a city that had to build its own past a second time.