Things to do in Poznań

Landmark · Old Town

One of the largest and most colourful market squares in Poland, rebuilt after 1945 around a Renaissance town hall with a working mechanical clock.

Local tip: At noon two mechanical goats butt heads above the town hall clock — twelve times, every day, since 1551. It is small, brief, and the entire city stops to watch it, which is the point. The merchants' houses along the west side are the best-preserved row.

Culture · Cathedral Island

The island where the Polish state effectively began — Mieszko I's stronghold, the country's oldest cathedral, and the graves of the first two rulers.

Local tip: The Porta Posnania interpretation centre across the water is one of the best-designed museums in Poland and explains why this small island matters more than anything else in the city. Go there first, then walk to the cathedral rather than the reverse.

Culture · Śródmieście, by the university

A museum on the site of the university where Rejewski, Różycki and Zygalski first broke the German Enigma cipher in 1932, seven years before the war.

Local tip: The Polish contribution is routinely left out of the British telling of this story, and the museum makes its case without shouting. It is hands-on enough to hold children and serious enough for adults, which is a rare combination.

Neighborhood · North-west of the centre

A grid of late nineteenth-century tenements that survived the war, now the city's independent restaurant, bar and small-shop district.

Local tip: This is where people who could afford the Old Town choose to live instead. Walk Roosevelta to Dąbrowskiego and then into the side streets — the market hall on Rynek Jeżycki is the local one, not the tourist one.

Nature · East of the centre

An artificial lake built for rowing regattas, with a ski slope, a thermal baths complex, a narrow-gauge railway and a genuinely good zoo around it.

Local tip: The Maltanka narrow-gauge train runs from the lake to the new zoo and is the correct way to arrive with children. In June the Malta Festival takes over the whole area and much of the city centre with it.

Nature · North of the centre

A hundred hectares of park on the site of the Prussian citadel that was largely destroyed in the 1945 battle for the city, with two military cemeteries and Magdalena Abakanowicz's Unrecognized sequence of headless figures.

Local tip: Most visitors never come this far north and it is the best park in the city. Abakanowicz's 112 walking iron figures in the eastern meadow are worth the trip on their own, and the Commonwealth war graves are a quiet reminder of who else fought here.