At 200 metres on each side, the Rynek Główny is one of the largest medieval market squares in Europe, and it has been the centre of Kraków's civic and commercial life since the city received its charter in 1257. The square is enclosed on all sides by Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque townhouses — their facades painted in warm ochres and creams — and it buzzes day and night with cafes, horse-drawn carriages, and the stalls of street vendors selling obwarzanki (the Kraków bagel, a pretzel-like ring that has been sold here since the Middle Ages).
At its centre sits the Cloth Hall (Sukiennice), the long arcaded Renaissance loggia that once housed the most important trading exchange in Poland. Around it, pigeons by the thousand and tourists by the thousand more circle the Adam Mickiewicz monument, the square's most photographed object. In the evenings, the restaurants that ring the square fill tables outside until well past midnight, and the air carries the distant sound of a trumpeter playing from the tower of St. Mary's Basilica — a tradition that has continued every hour, on the hour, since at least the 14th century.