Nowa Huta

This guide to Nowa Huta in Kraków opens with a Communist-planned steelworkers' town built with everything but a church, and the residents who began petitioning for one as early as 1952. It follows the standoff that came next: a wooden cross raised in 1960, torn down by police, and raised again, and a young bishop named Karol Wojtyla who started saying open-air Mass on that same field every Christmas. You'll hear how long it took before permission finally came. Walk the star-shaped avenues that were never meant to lead anywhere near a church.