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Forty-five kilometres north of Kielce, SZYDLOWIEC is exactly the kind of dusty Stare Miasto most people whizz through on the way to and from Krakow, but there's enough worth seeing in its small, but nonetheless enjoyable, set of historical monuments to justify a brief stopover. A placid central Rynek provides the focal point of the town, dominated by a fine town hall , substantially renovated since the late 1980s, a robust early-seventeenth-century construction topped with a high tower, the attic's arcaded decorative frieze emphasizing the influence of Krakow's Sukiennice on the style of construction. There's a pleasant cafe in the cellars underneath the building that also holds occasional concerts and other cultural events. Off the southern side of the Rynek stands the late-Gothic Kosciol sw. Zygmunta (Church of St Sigismund), with accompanying belfry, completed in the early 1500s, and mercifully spared the usual later Baroque accretions. Notable features of the largely well-preserved original interior include the sumptuous early-seventeenth-century high altar , a fine carved Coronation of the Virgin from 1531 and, most striking of all, the late-Gothic polyptych housed in the presbytery. Produced by one of the prolific Krakow workshops of the period, the central panel illustrates the Assumption of the Virgin, with the twelve Apostles gathered round the empty tomb of the resurrected Christ. Below them kneel the figures of the Szydlowiec family, the town founders and financial patrons of the church. Mikolaj Szydlowiecki, royal chancellor until his death in 1532, is commemorated in a fine marble tablet executed by Bartolomeo Berecci of Wawel cathedral fame. Half a kilometre west of the Rynek is the town castle , a dilapidated old pile surrounded by a stagnant moat, built for Chancellor Szydlowiecki in the 1510s, overhauled a century later and, by the look of things, allowed to sink gracefully into decline ever since. Much of the castle is closed to visitors, the major exceptions being the cobbled inner courtyard and a Muzeum Ludowych Instrumentow Muzycznych (Museum of Folk Instruments; Tues-Fri 9am-3.30pm, Sat 10am-5.30pm; entrance from the south side of the building; 3zl), which houses an enjoyable selection of musical accoutrements ranging from fiddles, accordions, hurdy-gurdys and bagpipes to more exotic creations such as animal-shaped whistles and percussion instruments of all shapes and sizes. Jews formed a sizeable percentage of the town population up until the liquidation of the Nazi-established ghetto here in January 1943, when they were deported en masse to Treblinka. Echoes of their presence revolve around the former synagogue , now a library, on ul. Grabarskiej, near the old Jewish-run brewery on ul. Sowinskiego, and most powerfully of all in the cemetery , out at the end of ul. Wschodnia, on the edge of town near the Radom road. One of the largest and most impressive such sites left in Poland, a walk through the walled, overgrown burial ground, where over 3000 tombstones are still standing, the oldest dating back to the late eighteenth century, uncovers numerous examples of the elaborately carved floral and symbolic motifs typical of Jewish matzevot in Poland and elsewhere in east-central Europe. A memorial near the main cemetery gate commemorates the 16,000 Jews deported from the town in 1943.
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