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As the presence of several churches indicates, the western part of Kazimierz was the part where non-Jews tended to live. Despite its Baroque overlay, which includes some ornately carved choir stalls and a boat-shaped pulpit complete with rigging, the interior of the Gothic Kosciol Bozego Ciala (Church of Corpus Christi), on the corner of ul. Bozego Ciala, retains early features including stained-glass windows installed around 1420, tranquil cloisters and well-tended gardens. The Swedish king Carl Gustaf is supposed to have used the building as his operational base during the mid-seventeenth-century siege of the city. The high church looks onto plac Wolnica , the old market square of Kazimierz, now much smaller than it used to be, thanks to the houses built along the old trade route through it in the nineteenth century. The fourteenth-century town hall , later rebuilt, stands in what used to be the middle of the square, its southern extension an overambitious nineteenth-century addition. It now houses the largest ethnographic museum in the country (Mon 10am-6pm, Wed-Fri 10am-3pm, Sat & Sun 10am-2pm; 4zl; free on Sun). The collection focuses on Polish folk traditions, although there's also a selection of artefacts from Siberia, Africa, Latin America and various Slav countries. A detailed survey of life in rural Poland includes an intriguing section devoted to ancient folk customs and an impressive collection of costumes, painting, woodcarving, fabrics and pottery - an excellent introduction to the fascinating and often bizarre world of Polish folk culture. Two more churches west of the square are worth looking in on. On ul. Skaleczna stands fourteenth-century Kosciol sw. Katarzyny (St Catherine's Church), founded by King Kazimierz for Augustine monks imported from Prague. The large basilican structure covered by an expansive roof is a typical and structurally well-preserved example of Krakow Gothic, though the bare interior has suffered everything from earthquakes to the installation of an Austrian arsenal. The Gothic vestibule on the southern side of the church features some delicate carved stonework, while the adjoining cloisters contain some notable surviving fragments of the original Gothic murals. Further down the road is the Pauline church and monastery , perched on a small hill known as Skalka (the Rock). Tradition connects the church with St Stanislaw, the bishop of Krakow, whose martyrdom by King Boleslaw the Bold in 1079 is supposed to have happened here. Conscious of the symbolic position the canonized martyr grew to assume in the medieval tussle for power between Church and State, later kings made a point of doing ritual penance at the site following their coronation. An altar to the popular saint stands in the left aisle of the remodelled Baroque church, and underneath you can see the block on which he's supposed to have been beheaded. Underneath the church is a crypt cut into the rock of the hill, which was turned into a mausoleum for famous Poles in the late nineteenth century. Eminent artists, writers and composers buried here include Krakow's own Stanislaw Wyspianski, composer Karol Szymanowski and the medieval historian Jan Dlugosz.
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