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Kraków (pronounced ; in English also spelled Krakow or Cracow, (Category: File - :Speaker Icon.svg|13px|link=http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/audio.pl?ggkrak03.wav listen)) is one of the largest and oldest cities in Poland and a popular tourist destination.euromonitor.com Top 150 City Destinations, Caroline Bremner, 11 Oct 2007. Retrieved 29 May 2009staypoland.com Krakow TOURISM. Retrieved 29 May 2009 Its historic centre was inscribed on the list of World Heritage Sites as the first of its kind. Properties inscribed on the World Heritage list, Poland. Ratification of the convention: June 29, 1976. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Last updated: July 6, 2009 Situated on the Vistula river () in the Lesser Poland region, the city dates back to the 7th century.The Municipality Of Kraków Press Office, 1996?2007, in participation with ACK Cyfronet of the AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, cultural and artistic life, and is one of Poland's most important economic centres. It was the capital of Poland from 1038 to 1596, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Kraków from 1846 to 1918, and the capital of Kraków Voivodeship from the 14th century to 1999. It is now the capital of the Lesser Poland Voivodeship.

The city has grown from a Stone Age settlement to Poland's second most important city. It has begun as a hamlet on Wawel Hill; and, was reported as a busy trading centre of Slavonic Europe already in 965. With the emergence of the Second Polish Republic and throughout the 20th century, Kraków reaffirmed its role as a major academic and artistic centre in the country with the establishment of new universities and cultural venues.

The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language. It is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics such as the kreska, which is graphically similar to an acute accent (?, ?, ó, ?, ?), the dot above (?), the ogonek (?, ?), and the stroke (?). The standard 8-bit character encoding for the Polish alphabet is ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), although both ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7) and ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10) encodings include glyphs of the Polish alphabet. Microsoft's format for encoding the Polish alphabet is Windows-1250.

Poland (), officially the Republic of Poland (Rzeczpospolita Polska), is a country in Central Europe. Poland is bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north. The total area of Poland is , making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. Poland has a population of over 38 million people, which makes it the 34th most populous country in the worldNationMaster.com 2003-2007, Poland, Facts and figures and the most populous Eastern European Member State of the EU.

The establishment of a Polish state is often identified with the adoption of Christianity by its ruler Mieszko I, in 966 (see Baptism of Poland), when the state covered territory similar to that of present-day Poland. In 1025, Poland became a kingdom and in 1569, it cemented a long association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, by signing the Union of Lublin, forming the Polish?Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth collapsed in 1795 and Poland's territory was partitioned among Kingdom of Prussia, Russian Empire and Austria. Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic in 1918, after World War I, but lost it again in World War II, then occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland lost over six million citizens in World War II, emerging several years later as the socialist People's Republic of Poland within the Eastern Bloc, under strong Soviet influence.

During the Revolutions of 1989, communist rule was overthrown and Poland became what is constitutionally known as the "Third Polish Republic". Poland is a unitary state, made up of sixteen voivodeships (). Poland is also a member of the European Union, NATO, United Nations, World Trade Organization, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).