Krakow’s favorite attraction, the Wawel Dragon that guards the cave beneath the former royal Wawel Castle, has stopped “breathing fire” due to high gas bills, which tourists and residents of the city in southern Poland have been waiting for every five minutes for 53 years.
“Attention. The Wawel Dragon is on a diet. For some time now, we have noticed that it is excessively fat. It has an excessive appetite and needs to go on a diet. It is consuming more gas than usual,” the Krakow Roads Directorate, which owns the dragon, warned on its website.
At a time when electricity and gas bills are causing headaches for both citizens and businesses in Poland, the Wawel Dragon has suddenly started consuming twice as much as the usual 11 cubic meters of gas per day and is awaiting an overhaul to see where the fault lies and whether the device can be modernized.
The Dragon’s Cave is located at the foot of Wawel Hill on the bank of the Vistula River, where Wawel Castle and the cathedral are located, and where, according to legends written at the end of the 12th century, a dragon lived, terrorizing the locals, demanding a Sunday meal, and when there were no livestock, it also ate people, until it was tricked into killing by the sons of King Krakus, the founder of the city, or, as was orally passed down among the people, by a brave shoemaker who gave it a dead sheep filled with sulfur to eat.
The Wawel Dragon swallowed the sheep whole, the sulfur in it ignited such a big fire that it jumped into the Vistula to put out the fire in its belly and drank so much water that it burst, legend says.
In front of the entrance to the cathedral, bones of creatures from the Pleistocene are hung on a chain on the wall as a reminder of the Wawel Dragon, and according to legends, if the chain breaks and the bones fall to the floor, the end of the world will come.
The monumental sculpture of the Wawel Dragon, which, since 1972, has been spewing fire to the delight of tourists visiting the castle, the cathedral and the Dragon’s Cave, is not the only attraction in Krakow related to this creature from the city’s myth.
At the end of 2023, 17 small dragons were installed in various places in Kraków, and since 2000, the Great Grotesque Theater has been organizing the Great Dragon Parade, where dragons from various countries of the world gather, first in the Dragon Parade through the city center, and when it gets dark, they float over the Vistula with a light show and appropriate music.
