Kraków Zoo

This guide to Kraków Zoo follows Kinga, an elephant who arrived by train from Łódź in October 1963 as the zoo's first, at a moment when the zoo itself was still recovering from being stripped bare under German wartime administration. It traces what her arrival meant for a collection rebuilding from almost nothing, and the decades she spent here in the Wolski Forest as the animal every child in Kraków wanted to see. The forest setting still shapes how the zoo's giraffe, tiger and elephant enclosures are laid out today.