Bem vindos, welcome, bien vennue, etc...
Bem vindos ao meu blog!
Fotos da Carla e do Roy em terras de sua Majestade.
Enjoy.
The Gothic Wawel Castle was built at the behest of Casimir III the Great and consists of a number of structures situated around the central courtyard. In the 14th century it was rebuilt by Jogaila and Jadwiga of Poland. Their reign saw the addition of the tower called the Hen’s Foot (Kurza Stopka) and the Danish Tower. The Jadwiga and Jogaila Chamber, in which Szczerbiec, used in coronation ceremonies, is exibited today, is another remnant of this period. Other structures were developed on the hill during that time as well to serve as quarters for the numerous clergy, royal clerks and craftsmen. Defensive walls and towers such as Jordanka, Lubranka, Sandomierska, Tęczyńska, Szlachecka, Złodziejska and Panieńska were erected in the same period.
People have lived on the Wawel Hill at the site of the Castle as early as fifty thousand years ago, in the Paleolithic Age. The settlement was apparently bustling with trade, assorted crafts and local farming. When more people begun to settle down on the Wawel Hill and when the trade became more efficient, the rulers of Poland took up their residence at the Hill as well.
During the early 16th century King Sigismund I the Old (Zygmunt I in Polish) and his wife, brought in the best native and foreign artists including Italian architects, sculptors, and German decorators, to refurbish the castle into a splendid Renaissance palace. It soon became a paragon of stately residence in Central and Eastern Europe and served widely as a model throughout the region.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of Nazi Germany's concentration camps. Its remains are located in Poland approximately 50 kilometres west of Kraków and 286 kilometers south from Warsaw. The camp took its name from the nearby town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz in German). Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka, refers to the many birch trees surrounding the complex.
The camp commandant, Rudolf Höß, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that up to 3 million people had died at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has revised this figure to 1.1 million, about 90 percent of whom were Jews from almost every country in Europe.[3] Most victims were killed in Auschwitz II's gas chambers using Zyklon B; other deaths were caused by systematic starvation, forced labour, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported "medical experiments".
In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded a museum at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. By 1994, some 22 million visitors — 700,000 annually—had passed through the Iron Gate crowned with the motto "Arbeit macht frei".
The three main camps were:
Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp which served as the administrative centre for the whole complex, and was the site of the deaths of roughly 70,000 people, mostly Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp or Vernichtungslager, where at least 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles, and some 19,000 Roma (Gypsies) were killed. Birkenau was the largest of all the Nazi extermination camps.
Auschwitz III (Monowitz), which served as a labour camp for the Buna-Werke factory of the I.G. Farben concern.
There were also around 40 satellite camps, some of them tens of kilometres from the main camps, with prisoner populations ranging from several dozen to several thousand.
Like all German concentration camps, the Auschwitz camps were operated by Heinrich Himmler's SS. The commandants of the camp were the SS-Obersturmbannführers Rudolf Höß until the summer of 1943, and later Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer. Höß provided a detailed description of the camp's workings during his interrogations after the war and also in his autobiography. He was hanged in 1947 in front of the entrance to the crematorium of Auschwitz I.
The Wieliczka Salt Mine, located in the town of Wieliczka, is within Poland's Kraków metropolitan area. It had been until 2007 in continuous operation, producing table salt, since the 13th century. It was one of the world's oldest operating salt mines (the oldest being in Bochnia, Poland, some 20 kilometers distant from Wieliczka).Active mining was discontinued in 1996 due to low salt prices and mine flooding. The mine remains a major tourist attraction.The mine reaches down to a depth of 327 meters and is over 300 km long.The Wieliczka salt mine features a 3.5-km. tour for visitors (less than 1% of the length of the mine's passages) that includes statues of historic and mythic figures. The older works were sculpted by miners out of rock salt; more recent figures have been fashioned by contemporary artists. Even the crystals of the chandeliers are made from rock salt that has been dissolved and reconstituted to achieve a clear, glass-like appearance. The rock salt is naturally grey, in various shades like granite, so that the carvings resemble carved unpolished granite rather than having the white or crystalline appearance that many visitors expect. (The carvings appear white in the photos below; the actual carved figures are not white.)
Also featured is a large chamber with walls carved to resemble wooden chapels built by miners in earlier centuries; an underground lake; and exhibits on the history of salt mining. The mine is often referred to as "the Underground Salt Cathedral of Poland."About 1.2 million people visit the mine each year.
Over the centuries, visitors to this site have included Nicolaus Copernicus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Dmitri Mendeleyev, Bolesław Prus, Ignacy Paderewski, Robert Baden-Powell, Jacob Bronowski (who filmed segments of The Ascent of Man in the mine), Karol Wojtyła (who later became Pope John Paul II), former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and many others.During World War II, the salt mine was used by the occupying Germans as facilities for war-related production plants.
To get down to the 150-meter level of the mine, visitors must walk down a wooden stairway of some 400 steps. After the 3 kilometer tour of the mine's corridors, its chapels, statues and lake, visitors take an elevator back up to the surface. The elevator holds 36 people (9 per car) and takes roughly 30 seconds to reach the surface. The salt mine helped to inspire the Labyrinth scenes in Bolesław Prus' 1895 historical novel, Pharaoh. In 1978 the Wieliczka salt mine was placed on the original UNESCO roster of World Heritage Sites.
