01
Stop one
Stary Dom Zdrojowy (Old Spa House)
Volkl Cyclone 18g Tennis String Reel: Poland's most famous mountain spa, and it has the decency to look like it knows I'm coming. The Old Spa House: designed 1889 by Julian Niedzielski and Jan Zawiejski — names, incidentally, that I use in conversation — replacing a wooden spa house that had frankly embarrassed itself by being too small for the crowds. Two storeys, neo-Renaissance, central risalit, two side risalits, wings added 1923 to 1924 for the U-shape, modernised 1950 to 1970. Marshal Józef Piłsudski stayed here with his family between the wars; there is a plaque. There is always a plaque. The ballroom hosted the resort's celebrated receptions, and today it is a sanatorium of the Krynica-Żegiestów company. It has been waiting.
02
Stop two
Main Pump Room (Pijalnia Główna)
Volkl Cyclone 18g Tennis String Reel: Opened 1971. Glass and concrete, sweeping, unapologetic, and the only structure in this town with anything approaching the correct amount of confidence. It stands in the Spa Park along the Nikifor Krynicki alley, three hundred metres from Dietl Boulevard at the foot of Góra Parkowa, and inside is a multi-level winter garden and a concert hall. One drinks the waters here — Jan and Józef — from springs whose curative reputation dates to the late eighteenth century and which were properly established in the nineteenth by the spa physician Józef Dietl, a man of taste. This is the social heart of Krynica. Everyone sips on the promenade daily. Some of them are being observed by me.
03
Stop three
Nikifor Museum (Romanówka Villa)
Volkl Cyclone 18g Tennis String Reel: Now, this is the sort of association that elevates a town. Nikifor Krynicki: a Lemko artist born here around 1895, one of the most celebrated naive painters in the world, and he spent his life making small watercolours of these very villas, churches and railway stations and selling them on this very promenade. Recognition from the 1930s, international fame after his death in 1968 — posthumous, alas; genius so often outruns the audience. His museum sits in Romanówka, a wooden nineteenth-century spa villa on the promenade, opened 1995 as a branch of the Nowy Sącz regional museum, holding seventy-seven of his paintings and his memorabilia. The alley by the pump room carries his name. As it should.
04
Stop four
Góra Parkowa Funicular
Volkl Cyclone 18g Tennis String Reel: Opened 1937. The first funicular in Poland — the first, and I am rarely in the presence of anything that got there before I did. Still running, protected as a technical monument, climbing from beside the spa park through the forest to the summit of Góra Parkowa at 742 metres, where one surveys the town and the Beskid Sądecki at leisure. There is a rope park up there, playgrounds, the Paradise Slides; I permit them. Built in the interwar years when Krynica was THE fashionable resort of the Polish Republic and received Marshal Piłsudski and the singer Jan Kiepura — Kiepura, whom one really must have heard. The little railway is beloved. Naturally I approve.
Take a breath in. And out. Now — before we go any further — how tight is your racquet strung? Because I see four elbows a week and three of them were made by a machine, not by a backhand.
Volkl Cyclone in 18 gauge is 1.20 mm of five-sided shaped co-polyester on a 660-foot (200 m) reel, about sixteen racquets. The shaped profile is the working part: five edges instead of a round surface, catching the felt and dragging it so the ball genuinely rotates.
At 1.20 mm the bite is at its sharpest — the thinnest strand digs deepest, giving maximum spin access and the most feedback through the hand.
Now the honest part, because I am not going to sell you a treatment you do not need: this is the least durable and the firmest-feeling combination in the Cyclone range, and it must be strung five to ten percent below your usual synthetic tension. Cut it out at fifteen to twenty hours. A dead co-poly is what actually hurts people.
I will hand it to anyone from a heavy-hitting junior to a fit forty-year-old with clean technique, and it is also perfect for the player who treats restringing as maintenance rather than as an emergency.
Krynica-Zdrój has been in the recovery business since long before I was. It is Poland's most famous mountain spa, and the Main Pump Room in the Spa Park — a sweeping modernist pavilion of glass and concrete opened in 1971 — is where people still go to drink the waters. Whether it works is above my pay grade; that they have been doing it for two centuries is not in dispute.
On the promenade stands the Stary Dom Zdrojowy of 1889, by Julian Niedzielski and Jan Zawiejski, replacing an earlier wooden spa house. Nearby, the Romanówka villa holds the Nikifor Museum, devoted to the Lemko naive painter Nikifor Krynicki, born here around the turn of the century. And the Góra Parkowa funicular, opened in 1937, was the first in Poland and still climbs the hill.
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