Touring Torun

The city of Torun is about three hours north-west of Warsaw (by train), on the line to Gdansk. We got up early, skipped breakfast, and picked up the train at 7:00 AM. (For those of you who are interested, our round-trip, first-class tickets were about $30 each.)

Torun is one of the few towns in Poland (or Germany) that was spared in WWII. There are a lot of tourists, but since it was a Wednesday, it wasn' too crowded. The tour groups tend to be either school kids (lots of those), or older people. I'm guessing on the weekends, there would be a lot more 20-somethings.

Torun was founded by the Teutonic Knights after the second Crusade (around 1233). They built a castle and a wall, which then, because it was a port, drew in merchants and craftsmen. In 1280, Torun joined the Hanseatic League, a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and their market towns which later dominated the Baltic maritime trade along the coast of Northern Europe.

There is not much left of the original castle, although the city walls of the old town are still standing. (The old town dates from 1233, while the "new" town dates from 1263). We spent a few hours touring the castle and some of the excavations that started in 1953 after the war.

The old town square has an impressive, Gothic, red-brick city hall. Around the square are various statues. Torun is the home town of Polish astronomer Copernicus (although, since Torun was German at the time, Germany claims him as well.) His statue anchors one corner of the square.

Opposite him is a statue of Janko Muzykant, Torun's version of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Instead of playing a pipe, Janko played the violin, and instead of rats, Torun was besieged by frogs.

The other two corners of the square are taken up with a bronze donkey which is a copy of the actual wooden donkey that stood here in medieval times, to which criminals were strapped and flogged. The other corner contains a small statue of Filus the favorite pet of Professor Filutek in the long-running Polish comic strip.

For lunch we stopped in a nice self-service canteen with thatched mini-cottages and stained-glass windows for seating. The food was delicious and inexpensive (about $10 for lunch for the both of us ... including drinks).

Besides Copernicus, Torun's other claim to fame is its piernika or gingerbread. Kathy and I are all about tradition, so we had to try a little of each variety.

Our train back to Warsaw left at 5:00 pm and we got back around 8:00. Walking into town by the train station, we came across a group calling themselves the Street Church who were playing music, preaching  the gospel, and feeding the hungry. They do this every Wednesday night. What a refreshing surprise.

On our way back to our hotel for dinner, we decided to just eat like all the other Poles instead of like American tourists. We had Kentucky Fried Chicken.