Symbols of Cracow

The city of Cracow uses a coat of arms, a seal, official colors, a flag, and a banner as its official symbols. Additionally, a number of semi-official and unofficial symbols of the city are also used.

Coat of Arms of Cracow

The current official symbols of Cracow are described by the Ordinance of the Cracow City Council no. CXXIII/1150/02 adopted on October 9, 2002. However, they are all based on symbols which have been in use since much earlier, some of them dating back to the 16th century.

The coat of arms displays a red brick wall with three towers in a blue field. Each tower, the middle one taller and wider than the other two, is topped with a battlement with three crenels and has a black vertical loophole and a black window. In the wall there is a gate with a pair of open golden doors with fleur-de-lis-shaped metalwork and a raised golden grate. Inside the gate there is the White Eagle with a golden crown , beak and talons. The escutcheon has a typically Renaissance shape and is topped with a golden Crown of Bolesław I the Brave with fleurs-de-lis, closed with a globus cruciger (an orb with a cross).

The crowned White Eagle, which is also used in the coat of arms of Poland, and the crown above the escutcheon symbolize the fact that Cracow was the Polish capital and seat of Polish kings from ca. 1040 until 1596. The coat of arms with the brick wall, the three towers, the open gate and the eagle dates back to the 16th century. The actual colors and shapes, however, changed with time. The current design, adopted in 2002, uses shapes of the escutcheon and the eagle based on those found on Renaissance seals, signets and other artifacts, but other shapes, including Gothic and Neo-Classical, were also used in past. The Free City of Cracow, a city state which existed between 1815 and 1846 used the Cracow coat of arms as its state symbol. The Grand Duchy of Cracow created after the Free City's annexation by the Austrian Empire, used the White Eagle with the Cracow coat as an inescutcheon but without the eagle inside the gate.

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