Most heritage sites ask you to look at one moment. Wawel makes you look at four or five at once, and it does this on a single lawn, in about the space of a football pitch. Stand at the south-eastern end of the outer courtyard and the hill lays itself out like a diagram. In the middle distance, the cathedral: a green copper cap on the Sigismund Tower, a brick clock tower with the flag on it, and off to the right the gilded dome of the Sigismund Chapel, which has been catching whatever light Kraków can spare since the 1530s.

Historians love a crowded date. The days when empires fell, when shots were fired, when the world lurched in a new direction. But what about the days when nothing happened? Finding a truly event-free date in recorded history is nearly impossible — and that’s the point. The closer you look, the more you realize that “nothing happened” is almost always a failure of perspective, not a fact. Take April 11, 1954.

Ask any American what happened on September 11, 2001, and the answer comes instantly. Ask what happened on September 12th — or on the many September 11ths before 2001 — and the room goes quiet. Memory is not neutral. The dates we collectively remember are not simply the most important ones. They are the ones that powerful institutions — governments, media, schools — chose to commemorate, teach, and repeat. September 11, 1973: a US-backed coup overthrows Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende.