Wawel Dragon
The Wawel Dragon was a beast that is said to have inhabited the Wawel Hill, a limestone outcrop in the city of Krakow, Poland. When the dragon lived, Krakow was the capital of country, and home to the first king of Poland, King Krakus, who founded the city according to legend in 700AD. He first developed the Wawel Hill, despite the dragon living in a cave in the rock face. If this sounds like a recipe for disaster, indeed it was, as Wincenty Kadłubek’s Chronica Polonorum (‘Chronicle of Poland’), a Latin text written between 1190 and 1208, reveals in detail.
The dragon was ferocious, and instantly set about picking off the people who had moved onto its patch. Once again, the dragon somehow agreed a price for peace, in the form of a weekly ration of cattle which it greedily devoured whole, to the locals’ disgust. King Krakus was disgraced by the beast’s unchecked tyranny, and together with his two sons set about trying to kill it. After several unsuccessful attempts, the sons stuffed cattle skins with ignited sulphur, and left them for the dragon. Its habit of swallowing its meals whole was fatal: the sulphur suffocated the unsuspecting dragon.
One of the sons, also named Krakus, killed his older brother in order to claim credit for the victory, and blamed the dragon. The king believed him, and the young Krakus succeeded his father, but was banished when the deception came to light. The Wawel Dragon still looms large in the modern city of Krakow. Beneath the castle on Wawel Hill is a cave, known as the Dragon’s Lair, where it supposedly lived. In the introduction we mentioned the influence of fossilized megafauna on dragon legends, and outside Wawel Cathedral hang ‘dragon bones’ which are actually mammoth or whale remains.
