Poznan

Poznan needs 2 days: the market square with its Renaissance town hall, where two mechanical goats butt heads every day at noon, on one, and Cathedral Island, with Poland's first cathedral and the tombs of its earliest rulers, on the other. May-September brings the best weather. It's cheaper than Warsaw or Kraków. It's considered the cradle of the Polish state: it was here that Prince Mieszko I was baptized in the year 966, an event that marked the official birth of Poland as a Christian nation, and its cathedral holds the crypts of Poland's first kings.