More on the Cloth Hall

My post yesterday about the Rynek Underground museum lacked context because it's kind of hard to describe the market square in Krakow. Basically, there has been a market here in some form or another for potentially 3000 years. Most of that was as a primitive village, so it probably doesn't count, but Krakow itself is more than 1000 years old as a city. The Rynek and a nearby church were what the city was built around. The Cloth Hall was a major center of trade for the entire region. Here is a picture with some perspective from the southeast corner near a small romanesque church that sits incongruously out in the middle of things:

And another from a different angle...

Inside the lower level under the arches are restaurants. Within the Cloth Hall are merchant stalls, generally dealing with varying degrees of tourist goods. There is some nice amber inside, but the better deals are supposed to be down in the Jewish Quarter or even just up the street. From an American perspective it is slightly surreal because the stall owners are generally content to let throngs of people wander past their wares without a single sales pitch.