On 26 November 1904 a naked young man with a sword went up on a small square in front of the university’s main building in Breslau, and the city has been telling stories about him ever since. He is still there. The buildings behind him are the same yellow Baroque wing, the square has the same awkward triangular shape, and the water still comes out of the four faces on the rim of the bowl.

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.

Status: Closed file. Martial law imposed 13 December 1981, suspended 31 December 1982, formally lifted 22 July 1983. Legal reckoning incomplete. Subject: The imposition of martial law in the Polish People’s Republic, the machinery used to enforce it, and the disputed justification behind it. Background Solidarity was legalised in the autumn of 1980 under the Gdańsk Agreement, and within a year it had somewhere close to ten million members in a country of thirty-six million.

A brown horse stands in harness on the cobbles of the Wrocław Rynek, waiting for a fare that has not arrived yet. Behind it the Old Town Hall shows its east face, the gilt gable with its blind tracery, the astronomical dial with its gold sun, the stepped brick pinnacles running up either side. A kiosk sells souvenirs from a doorway at the base. A few people sit on the steps of the pillory column.