Lajkonik Parade

The Tatar rider

The Lajkonik — also called the Tatarzyn or Konik zwierzyniecki — is a bearded horseman in quasi-oriental costume with a hobby horse around his waist, and one of the informal symbols of Kraków. On his day he wanders the backstreets of the Zwierzyniec district and the Old Town, giving symbolic blows with his mace to restaurateurs, shopkeepers and passers-by and collecting tribute in baskets. He is accompanied by rafters, the włóczkowie, dressed in Tatar-style costumes, and by the Mlaskoty band, folk musicians playing Kraków tunes on flute, trumpet, clarinet, accordion, drum and violins.

The parade sets off from the headquarters of the Kraków Waterworks on Senatorska Street, stops at the market on Plac na Stawach and then at the Norbertine Monastery in Salwator, where the Lajkonik dances in the courtyard and tries to strike the eagle on a large white-and-red flag with his mace. It then follows the same route every year to a stage by the Town Hall Tower on the Main Market Square, where the Lajkonik and the mayor raise a toast to the prosperity of the people of Kraków.

Legend and history

The origins of the parade are shrouded in legend, but it was shaped by the memory of the Mongol-Tatar invasions of the Middle Ages; one of them ravaged Kraków in 1241. A legend first written down in 1820 tells of the Włóczkowie, rafters who floated timber down the Vistula, defeating the Tatars around 1281; their leader put on the khan’s costume and rode his captured horse into the city. At the end of the eighteenth century the Bishop of Kraków is said to have banned the Lajkonik from the city, and the tradition survived thanks to the rafters and their descendants in Zwierzyniec. Around the turn of the twentieth century the painter Stanisław Wyspiański designed the costume still worn today, with its fiery red colour and lighter headdress. In 1936 the city made the parade the centrepiece of the Days of Kraków, and it is supervised today by the Museum of Kraków.