Kraków Nativity Scene Contest

A city in miniature

A Kraków szopka is a lightweight construction with the Nativity at its heart, surrounded by houses and monuments of Kraków transformed by each maker’s imagination. According to UNESCO, the scenes also show historical, cultural and contemporary events from the life of the city, Poland and the world, using figurines and artificial light. The frames are made of wood, plywood and cardboard and decorated with coloured paper, tissue paper, shiny metallic foil and even sweet wrappers. The architecture most often borrows from St Mary’s Church, the Sigismund Chapel on Wawel, the Barbican, the Cloth Hall and St Florian’s Gate, and symbols of Kraków and Poland — the crowned eagle, the city’s “K” monogram, white-blue and white-red flags — are woven in. The Christmas scene always takes the central place.

From builders’ winter work to UNESCO

The tradition took shape in the nineteenth century among craftsmen from the Kraków suburbs of Zwierzyniec and Krowodrza, mostly bricklayers, carpenters and construction workers, for whom making and selling nativity scenes brought in money in winter, when building work stopped. Lit from inside by candles, the scenes also served as portable theatres, carried with live music through the stairwells of the city’s tenement houses. The model for generations of makers was a large scene made by the bricklayer Michał Ezenekier at the end of the nineteenth century, now in the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków.

As factory-made decorations spread in the early twentieth century, the custom began to fade. In 1937 Jerzy Dobrzycki, head of the city’s propaganda office and later long-time director of the city’s historical museum, launched a contest to save it, and apart from the years of the Second World War it has been held every year since. Today several hundred makers of all ages take part, with prizes in more than a dozen categories, and families such as the Maliks of Zwierzyniec have kept the craft alive for generations. UNESCO inscribed the tradition on 29 November 2018.