Kielce Audio Tours

Kielce is the capital of the Swietokrzyskie (Holy Cross) region in south-central Poland, a city set among low forested hills that are among the oldest exposed geological formations in Europe, with quartzite ridges dating to the Devonian period. The most commanding building in the city is the Palace of the Krakow Bishops on Cathedral Hill, built in the early 17th century in a restrained Mannerist style and now housing the National Museum, one of the best regional collections in Poland. The cathedral alongside it contains important examples of Renaissance Polish memorial sculpture.

The Swietokrzyskie Mountains to the south and west offer accessible hiking through ancient holy sites, including the Benedictine monastery of Swiety Krzyz (Holy Cross), founded in the 11th century on a summit where a pagan shrine once stood and where a fragment of the True Cross has been venerated for centuries.

Kielce also carries a painful historical memory: in July 1946, a pogrom in the city killed 42 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, one of the worst postwar antisemitic episodes in Europe. A memorial at Planty Street marks the site and is part of any honest reckoning with the city's 20th-century history.