Muzeum Archeologiczne w Krakowie
Former prison and monastery housing a four-faced Slavic stone idol pulled from a riverbed.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Archaeological Museum in Kraków opens in 1848, when peasants digging in the shallows of the Zbruch River hit a limestone pillar taller than a man, carved with four faces looking in every direction. It asks who buried a stone god like this and why, and follows the trail back to Kievan Rus turning Christian around the 900s, when old shrines were torn down on royal order. The building itself has its own history of confinement: a fourteenth-century fortress that became a Carmelite monastery, then, under Austrian rule, a prison remembered locally as the Prison of Saint Michael.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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