“Poznaj Poznań” – get to know, meet. The hidden verb within the city’s name whispers an invitation that most travelers hurry past, eager for their next Instagram landmark, their next conversation-piece destination. But what if the most profound journeys measure not in kilometers but in attention? What if a single Christmas market, contained within the modest coordinates of medieval streets, holds enough wonder for a lifetime?
I’ve been thinking about smallness, the pressure of grand gestures and bucket lists and how we now value experiences more for their shareability than for their power to change us.
The Stary Rynek in Poznań occupies approximately 140 by 113 meters, a contained universe of cobblestones and colored lights that appears on no list of the “Top Ten European Christmas Markets.” You won’t find influencers staging elaborate photoshoots here in the same numbers as in Prague or Vienna. The square exists in that peculiar territory between the known and the overlooked, between the celebrated and the lived-in. It is, in other words, precisely the kind of place we’ve learned to scroll past.
But what if this modest square contains multitudes?
The Map That Matters
I spread out an imaginary map of Poznań’s Old Market Square in my mind, dividing it into sections, the way one might approach exploration: the eastern side with its Renaissance townhouses painted in ochre and rose, the western edge where the Town Hall presides with its mechanical goats that butt heads at noon, the northern stretch where wooden stalls release the scent of oscypek cheese and mulled wine, the southern boundary where carolers gather beneath lampposts strung with lights.
Each section, I decided, deserved its own kind of attention. Not the frantic attention of a tourist racing through a checklist, but the slow, serendipitous noticing that allows a place to reveal itself in layers.
This is what the climate crisis demands of us now: not the abandonment of discovery, but its reimagining. When flying becomes increasingly indefensible, when our carbon footprints sprawl across continents like accusations, we must learn to travel differently. Deeper instead of wider. Repeatedly instead of once. To treat a single Christmas market the way one might approach a single mountain range, as enough exploration for an entire lifetime.
The Vocabulary of Belonging
The festival begins in late November, when darkness arrives early and stays late, when the ancient anxiety about the weakening sun creeps back into our bones despite central heating and electric lights. The market stalls appear like a seasonal ritual, older than their wooden frames suggest, connecting us to those Celtic fire festivals, those desperate winter celebrations designed to coax the sun back from its retreat.
I watch the vendors arrange their wares: hand-carved nativity scenes, amber jewelry the color of frozen honey, wool slippers lined with sheepskin. These are not exotic treasures from distant lands. They are determinedly, unapologetically local, the material culture of a place that knows itself, that hasn’t forgotten its vocabulary.
Once you learn the name of something, you notice it everywhere. Pierniki, the gingerbread that appears in medieval recipes from this region. Paprykarz szczeciński, the fish paste locals spread on bread, bemusing tourists who expect something more photogenic. St. Martin’s croissants, filled with white poppy seeds and baked only on November 11th, as if temporality itself could be captured in pastry.
A lack of language leads to diminished attention. We lose our ability to name, describe, and appreciate particular aspects of places, and our competence for understanding possible relationships with local culture correspondingly diminishes. The Christmas market becomes “European Christmas market,” generic, interchangeable, reduced to an aesthetic rather than a living tradition.
But to know the names is to begin knowing the place. To know the place is to begin caring about its survival.
The Overlooked Grid Square
I decided to treat everything as interesting. The tourist would dismiss the old woman selling hand-knitted socks from a modest table as insufficiently picturesque. But I watched her weathered hands wrap each purchase in brown paper, saw how she smiled at returning customers, and recognized in her presence a kind of continuity that no amount of Instagram staging could manufacture.
There, by the fountain, barely visible beneath the more elaborate stalls, someone had placed a small wooden manger scene. The paint was fading. The figures were simple, almost crude. But a brass plaque noted it had been carved by a local craftsman who survived the war, who returned to Poznań when the city was rubble and rebuilt not just buildings but traditions, memories, the fragile architecture of cultural continuity.
This is what we miss when we chase the spectacular: the quiet acts of preservation, the unglamorous work of keeping something alive across generations simply because it matters to someone, to a community, to a sense of shared identity in an increasingly homogenized world.
Abundance and Possibility
Hundreds of grid squares could fill a map of this historic city. Here in Poznań, returning each winter, I find my own abundance: the same market revealing new layers, the vendors I recognize across years, the carols that lodge in memory, the taste of hot mead on a cold night, the particular quality of darkness in a Polish December.
A single Christmas market, it turns out, is enough exploration for a lifetime. Not because it never changes, but because I change, and returning allows me to measure that transformation against something stable, something rooted, something that whispers: poznaj – get to know, meet, encounter.
The map is small. The coordinates are modest. But within those boundaries lies everything that matters about why we travel at all, not to collect experiences like rare stamps, but to be changed by proximity to something real, something cherished, something that survives because communities decide it should.
I finish my coffee. The mechanical goats prepare to butt heads. The evening deepens around us.
It is a fine beginning, this practice of returning. This radical act of staying, of deepening rather than expanding, of learning to see what was always there, waiting to be noticed.
Poznaj Poznań.
Meet this place. Know it. Let it know you back.
By: Maciej Wlazly
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