The trumpeter of Krakow

It was in late July of the year 1461 that the sun rose one morning red and fiery as if ushering in midsummer’s hottest day. His rays fell upon the old city of Krakow and the roa...

He gave them a quick glance and motioned for them to pass. Another man in black peered into the cart to see what was inside and, finding nothing, concluded that these were farm...

Looking up quickly from a survey of his garments, now more ragged and dusty than ever, he perceived that the weight was the hand of the man in black and that the lightness had b...

Among the most remarkable personages of Krakow’s age of glory in the fifteenth century was a certain scholar-priest by the name of Jan Kanty. He had been educated at the Univers...

St. Ann’s Street was as black as pitch when they emerged from the habitation of the scholar-priest. He insisted on accompanying them and carried his little candle lantern for ai...

One of the great sights of Central Europe, even in those far-away days, which men came from all parts of the world to see, was the Church of Our Lady Mary in Krakow. Now though...

Joseph found himself too sleepy when he was inside his tiny bedroom to give any further attention either to the flashes of light from the loft above or to the mysterious grumbli...

Summer burned itself into fall. The Vistula which had been growing ever lower and lower with the heat was now but a narrow ribbon of water and the banks along it were parched an...

Cold weather came in late November—or Listopad, the month of Falling Leaves, as Polish folk call it—and found the poor people in the villages already fortified in their log huts...

Balls of red fire were shooting out into the air from the opened casement of the room in the loft, flooding the place with light as they burst with terrific explosions. In the l...

Down in the Ukraine that winter when men went about from habitation to habitation on the little horses that had noses so pointed that they could poke them through the snow and e...

Very much earlier on this same eventful night a girlish figure emerged from the door leading to Alchemist Kreutz’s lodgings on the third floor of the building where Pan Andrew l...

It was late one evening in April, a few weeks after the unsuccessful attack of Peter upon the tower, that the alchemist, Kreutz, and the student, Johann Tring, were sitting upon...

Since earliest times Krakow was divided into four sections—the Castle Quarter, the Potters’ Quarter, the Butchers’ Quarter, and the Slavkov. At the head of each of these distric...

Of all the wonders that the capital city of Poland possessed Joseph knew of none that stirred his imagination more than did this royal castle of the kings upon the Wawel. Impreg...

He had been listening attentively through all the talk, he had followed back and forth the give-and-take of conversation, the balancing of argument, the gestures, the decisions,...