Wawel Dragon

A bronze that was supposed to stand on Wolnica

The city tourism page, published on 20 November 2025, puts the sculpture at the entrance to the Dragon's Den, at the foot of Wawel Castle on the boulevard side. It is bronze, 6 metres, raised on a large stone in 1972. The first plan was a fountain on Wolnica Square in Kazimierz. The city authorities then chose the spot where, the same page says, a real dragon lived according to the legend. The flame is real and gas-fired. The page says it is run so that it stays safe, and that this flame does not add to smog. No interval between bursts is printed. By the date of that page the dragon had stood there for half a century, and the city calls both the figure and the statue a symbol of Kraków and one of the city's best-known attractions.

The cave page, describing the exit onto the boulevard, names the sculptor as Bolesław Chromy. The city page names Bronisław Chromy. Both tie the work to 1972. The two official pages do not explain the difference.

What the museum says the legend is

The cave page does not tell the story as a plot. It names three written versions. The oldest, tied to the mythic beginning of Kraków, is in the chronicle of Master Vincent called Kadłubek, from the turn of the 13th century. Jan Długosz changed that version and wrote that King Cracus himself killed the dragon. At the end of the 16th century Joachim Bielski added the cunning cobbler Skuba, and the museum says that is the version people know now.

Eighty-one metres of a cave cut in Jurassic limestone

The Dragon's Den is in the western slope of Wawel Hill. The museum says it formed nearly 12 million years ago by karst in the Jurassic limestone. The cave is 270 metres long. Visitors get 81 metres. After 1918, when Poland was independent again, Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz prepared it for visits.

The walk starts at the foot of the Thieves' Tower. The stair is inside a brick tower that used to be an Austrian well. The first and lowest chamber held water until the 19th century, and that water supplied the buildings on Wawel. The next chamber is the largest. At its highest point a brick dome from 1830 closes the natural mouth through which the historian Ambroży Grabowski entered in 1829. Through his work the den was opened to visitors in 1843–1846. In the 17th and 18th centuries part of this chamber was a store and a banquet room for a tavern on the Vistula bank, near the lower entrance.

On the left, behind a wooden post, a tunnel dug in 1974 runs off behind a grating into a side string of corridors. Those corridors are narrow and muddy, 160 metres, with five small lakes and a rare crustacean the museum calls the Tatra well-dweller, studniczek tatrzański. They are closed. The last cavern was the tavern's main room. It has rock projections, blind shafts and karst fissures, and the vault is held up by brick pillars. The way out is a pointed arch and a vestibule, onto the Vistula boulevard, in front of the statue.