Every design for Nowy Targ

Nowy Targ is the historic capital of Podhale and its largest town, a royal free town that the highlanders still call simply Miasto, ‘the Town’. It grew out of a border settlement known as Stare Cło, the Old Toll, and King Casimir the Great granted it town rights with wide self-government under Magdeburg law; later kings added two annual festivals and a weekly market, and a statute obliged merchants crossing the border to pass through its streets.

That market is the thread running through local memory: it still fills the town on Thursday and Saturday mornings, as it has for centuries. The town's history also holds harder moments – a great fire that destroyed the parish church and the town records, the Swedish sack during the Deluge, and the battle that ended the Goral peasant rebellion in Podhale. The Muzeum Podhalańskie im. Czesława Pajerskiego keeps the highland story, the Muzeum Drukarstwa w Nowym Targu the printed one, and the Pomnik Władysława Orkana and the Wieża Wodna stand among the familiar sights.

Look out for Góralka czytająca Tygodnik Podhalański: a highland woman lost in the local weekly, with the Gorce behind her and the Tatras to the south.