Collegium Maius

Oldest surviving building of the Jagiellonian University, founded 1364, with Gothic courtyard

The Jagiellonian University — founded in 1364 by King Casimir III, making it one of the oldest universities in the world — has its heart in the Collegium Maius, a 15th-century Gothic courtyard building that is the oldest surviving university building in Poland. The arcaded courtyard, with its wooden galleries and 15th-century well, is one of the most beautiful spaces in the city and can be visited freely during university hours.

The university museum on the upper floors contains a remarkable collection of scientific instruments — globes, astrolabes, telescopes, clocks — accumulated by the university since medieval times, when Krakow was one of the foremost centres of mathematics and astronomy in Europe. Guided tours of the museum leave from the courtyard at regular intervals; the tour that includes the great library hall (Stuba Communis) is particularly recommended. The automated display on the courtyard wall performs a mechanical pageant at noon and at set hours in the afternoon — a good moment to be in the courtyard.

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Among the scientific instruments on display is a terrestrial globe from around 1510 that is the oldest surviving globe to show the Americas — labelled, with extraordinary prescience, as "a newly discovered land." The globe came to the university's collection within a decade of Columbus's voyages, when the concept of a New World was still being absorbed by European scholars. Copernicus studied here from 1491 to 1495; some of the instruments he may have used are also in the collection.