Where the
Commonwealth still is.

The Royal Castle on the Vistula was the seat of the king, the meeting place of the Sejm, and the location where the 3 May Constitution was drafted and signed. Almost everything you see now is reconstruction: the castle and most of the Old Town were systematically demolished by the Germans in 1944, then rebuilt between 1948 and 1984 to the original plans. Allow a full morning for the castle (especially the Senate chamber and the Ballroom), the afternoon for the Old Town and the Krakowskie Przedmieście to the Holy Cross Church (where Chopin's heart is interred).

The coronation cathedral of the Polish kings (every king from 1320 to 1733 was crowned in Wawel Cathedral). The royal tombs include almost every Jagiellonian monarch, plus Sobieski, Kościuszko, Mickiewicz, and the more recent additions of Marshal Piłsudski and President Lech Kaczyński. The Kazimierz district, just south of the castle, is the historical Jewish quarter — preserved physically though almost entirely depopulated by the Holocaust. Visit the Old Synagogue, the Remuh Synagogue and cemetery, the Tempel Synagogue, and Schindler's factory in nearby Podgórze.

The capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania throughout the Commonwealth's existence, and the second city of the joint state in everything but population. The Old Town is the largest surviving baroque ensemble in northern Europe. Visit the Gediminas Tower (the Grand Ducal castle), the Cathedral of St Stanislaus (where the Lithuanian grand dukes were buried), the University of Vilnius (founded 1579, the oldest university in eastern Europe), the Gate of Dawn with its venerated icon, and the surviving Jewish Quarter with the Choral Synagogue, the only one of the city's 120 pre-Holocaust synagogues to remain in use.

The eastern Polish city where the Union of Lublin was signed in 1569. The hall of the Trinitarian friars where the oaths were exchanged is gone (the friary was secularised after the partitions and converted to municipal offices), but the cathedral and the castle of Lublin survive substantially. The castle's chapel of the Holy Trinity contains a unique programme of Ruthenian-Byzantine frescoes from 1418, commissioned by King Władysław Jagiełło — the most important surviving example of east-meets-west religious art in the Commonwealth. The castle was also used as a Nazi and then Soviet prison; the museum covers both periods.

The most important port of the Commonwealth from the fifteenth century to the partitions — a substantially German-speaking Hanseatic city under Polish royal sovereignty. The Long Market (Długi Targ) and the Mariacka church (St Mary's, the largest brick church in the world) define the Hanseatic core; the European Solidarity Centre at the old Lenin Shipyard covers the city's twentieth-century role as the cradle of the Solidarity movement. The buildings you see today are mostly post-1945 reconstructions to the original facades — the city was 90% destroyed in 1945.

The largest Polish city east of the Bug from the fourteenth century until 1945. The old town is one of the most intact pre-1939 multi-ethnic Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish urban ensembles surviving anywhere. Visit the Rynok Square, the Latin Cathedral, the Armenian Cathedral, the Orthodox Dormition Church, the Boim Chapel, and the old town walls. The Lychakiv Cemetery contains graves from every era of the Commonwealth, the partitions, and the interwar Republic, including the famous "Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów" from 1918. Note: travel to Ukraine in 2026 requires checking current conditions; western Ukrainian cities including Lviv have so far been relatively safe.

The fortress on the Smotrych river that was the Commonwealth's bulwark against the Ottoman frontier — lost to the Turks in 1672, recovered in 1699, lost again to Russia in the Second Partition. The stone castle, built on a rock peninsula carved by the river, is dramatic enough that it has been called "the Polish Edinburgh". Visit the castle, the old town (with its Polish, Armenian, Ruthenian and Tatar quarters all still distinguishable), and the Turkish-era minaret added to the Catholic cathedral (a unique monument to the brief Ottoman occupation).

The most complete surviving magnate palace from the Commonwealth's eighteenth century — the residence of the Lubomirski and Potocki families, in the south-east of modern Poland. The palace, with its surrounding star-shaped fortifications, gives a precise sense of how the great magnate families lived: private theatres, libraries of 20,000 volumes, a separate Italian garden, a Catholic chapel, and accommodation for a thousand staff. The annual Music Festival in May/June is one of the longest-running classical music events in Poland.

A Hanseatic city under the Commonwealth from 1466 to 1793 — and the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus in 1473. The old town is one of the most complete medieval brick-Gothic ensembles in Europe (UNESCO-listed for that reason). Visit the Copernicus House Museum, the Old Town Hall, the Cathedral of St John, and the ruins of the Teutonic castle on the river. The city was the location of the 1645 ecumenical Colloquium Charitativum (an early attempt at Protestant-Catholic theological reconciliation, which failed but produced one of the most learned theological gatherings of the seventeenth century).

The eastern Latvian region of Latgale was, from 1561 to 1772, Polish Inflanty — the part of the Commonwealth that lay north of Lithuania across the Daugava river. The town of Daugavpils (then called Dyneburg) was its centre. Visit the fortress (an early nineteenth-century Russian rebuilding of a Polish-era foundation), the Polish-Catholic baroque churches that still operate as parish churches, and the surrounding villages of Aglona (with its baroque pilgrimage basilica, the principal Catholic shrine in Latvia) and Krāslava (with the Plater family palace). The Latgalian language — closely related to Latvian but with distinct phonology — preserves vocabulary inherited from the Polish-Lithuanian period.