These tours are not your average guided tour (wycieczka z przewodnikiem). With a little help from a ‘Crazy Guide’ driving around in a brightly painted Eastern bloc Trabant, visitors to Kraków are taken back in time to discover the city’s Communist history.

“We try to make our customers understand and feel what the real Poland is about, and to show them things that cannot be found on postcards and in guide books“, explains ‘Crazy Mike’, founder of the now legendary tours of Kraków’s Communist past. Visitors are met from their hotel by a Crazy Guide, all of whom are carefully selected by Mike for their enthusiasm for history and their easy-going nature, and then driven around the purpose-built socialist district of Nowa Huta in a car from the Communist era.

Each tour aims to give visitors to Kraków a unique insight into life in Communist Poland. Mike explains, “We almost always visit Nowa Huta, the so-called ‘Communist District’ which is kind of like a time-warp. We also take visitors to a milk bar canteen that hasn’t changed since the 1980s; gives visitors a feel for how things used to be.” The Crazy Guides team has also recreated an apartment complete with authentic 1970s interiors – right down to every last detail.

Thanks to the guides’ in-depth knowledge of Nowa Huta and their enthusiasm for sharing the district’s history with visitors to Kraków. “Sometimes the guides take visitors off the beaten track and show them places like vegetable markets and tower block estates on the edge of the city that they probably would not have found on their own” says Mike.

The idea of creating alternative tours of Kraków that brought the city’s Communist history to life came to Mike while he was studying law and working part time as a hotel receptionist. While he found the job dull, he enjoyed chatting to the guests, and would regularly have a beer with them during his night-shifts. One day, an Amercian couple asked if he could give them a two hour guided tour of the city.

Mike turned up in his rather beaten-up Fiat 126, ready to take the couple around the city’s most popular sights, but on realising that they already knew Kraków quite well, he decided to skip the usual tourist haunts and show them some of the city’s hidden gems that were a bit more off the beaten track. He drove them to the mounds and barrows on the edge of the city, and then took them to the bohemian bars of the Jewish district, before taking them back to his apartment and cooking them dinner. The couple thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and tipped him generously. As a bonus, Mike took them to Nowa Huta and filled them in on its crazy history behind the Socialist city. Over a few beers afterwards, they told Mike that they had enjoyed the tour so much that he simply had to set up his own tour company. So, with bags of energy and a large dollop of fun, he invested in an East German Trabant, made a few quirky modifications… and Crazy Guides was born, though nobody seems to remember where the name came from!

The Crazy Guides’ Communism Tours started out as an alternative tour to the run of the mill historic tours, but it has since become a popular fixture on most sightseeing itineraries. In recent years, the tour has been featured in international media, including the BBC, Lonely Planet, Reuters, CNN Traveller, New York Times, Der Spiegel, La Republica among others.

The original Trabant that Mike first bought is still going strong, although the fleet has grown to include Polish Fiats and Russia Ladas. Mike has since built up a team of energetic, young guides who are extremely knowledgeable about Communist history, and are passionate about sharing it with visitors to Kraków. Of course success breeds imitators, and there have been attempts – albeit unsuccessful ones – to copy the formula, however Mike maintains that the Crazy Guides’ Communism Tours are the original and still the best. Why? Mike concludes, “we have always done this for the love of it, for the good times, the memories and the smile on our clients’ faces.”

Have anyone try it before? If not, definitely do it next time you are in Kraków. Here is their website:

http://www.crazyguides.com/

Do następnego razu… (Till next time…)