Some time ago I read an article in the The Spectator Australia about Paris. The author was an Englishman, but spoke with a sense of ownership towards the city. It seems to have unlocked a specific kind of romanticism in so many people, the kind only seen by foreigners in European cities. In the movie Sabrina (1995) a nerdy Englishwoman goes to Paris and finds herself. ‘America is my country and Paris is my hometown,’ she says, apparently quoting somebody else. I understand how they feel, but not for Paris. For me it’s Kraków, the heart of Central Europe.

I grew up in the suburbs and countrysides of England and Australia. When asked, I am an Australian, and there is a middling city in that country that is the easiest answer to, ‘Where are you from?’ But I left it half my lifetime ago, and haven’t been back since. Being something between suburban and country there are few cities I could navigate without a map, but Kraków is surely one of those I can navigate best.

I had wanted to see its colourful main square since shortly before I turned 18, but saw it first when I was 20. It is difficult to remap exactly how I wound up there, but it was my first time abroad on my own since I went to Vietnam (to teach English, this wasn’t that long ago).

I got off the coach from Katowice where the flight in had been cheaper, meeting the gaze of continental terraced townhouses staring down at me, unsure of what to expect. The hostel had no lock on the door and no receptionist – honour system I guess – and without data I spent my time getting lost on a paper map from a stack in the hallway.

I returned from that trip disappointed – the people of Poland were cold and businesslike on first impression, compared to their warmer Slovak neighbours. It takes time to learn how to not be a stranger over there.

Feeling I didn’t give the city or Poland a fair chance, I later spent two weeks in Kraków out of a month in the country. I still didn’t really like it. Whilst the Awiteks cakes and Obwarzanki held my interest, the bustle of the Old Town and sleaze of the hostel denizens soured things. An American tells me a story about a club better not retold, not in the least because I don’t really remember it. An Australian older than me doesn’t seem to carry himself like it, he’s looking for a date on Tinder. One British army veteran tells me he just finished volunteering in Ukraine.

Humanitarian, I assume – incorrectly, he shows me a picture of the Kalashnikov rifle they gave him. Nowa Huta and a cake shop near the ethnographic museum are a respite from everything in the city. The old lady at the till speaks no English, but is patient with my vague Polish and sells Szarlotka, which is something like a cross between apple pie and apple crumble, cheap…

I escape to the Tatras after that and have something more like a holiday in a log cabin in Bukowina Tatrzańska. Later I enjoy backpacking between the towns and forests of Poland on overnight PKP Intercity trains. As time goes by, one transfer after another on planes and trains take me through Kraków and I see passing snippets of coffee shops and bookstores and horses taking tourists over the cobbled Old Town streets. Soon the city maps out in my head and its Gothic red brick and sweeping Vistula banks become a second home on the continent. Seeing the city on a ticket headed somewhere else starts to put me at ease – Kraków, I know Kraków. In a sea of new train stations here is one pillar of familiarity, a place where I know how to get from one platform to the next.

From Edinburgh to Tel Aviv, I show my friends around a Kraków layover – this is my neck of the woods, I tell them, or something to that effect. There’s a cafe off the edge of the main square where I always get hot chocolate and a toasted sandwich. Back then. Stressed after finals and a haphazard alpine trip, I stop for three days in Nowa Huta, taking the rattling tram in to see the Dominican Church. This is the place, this is my place.

I visited again, just recently, and was a bit lost. Caught up in memories of that last cosy winter, I forgot how lonely the city can be. In Wrocław, it was easy to drop into a Catholic parish, but maybe that’s because I went on a pilgrimage that started there. In Kraków, I stop in and out of churches and walk back to my Airbnb on Carmelite Street without speaking to anyone I would see again. Last time I didn’t mind, the year had been so chaotic loneliness was a welcome break.

I remember in winter stopping in the Bernadine Church just before it closed, listening to my footsteps echo against the white pillars in the dark. Looking up through the shadows at St. Anthony, I think it was – what are European trips for if not moments like these?

On the last trip I found my Kraków again, in the pages of the ‘House under the Globe’ bookstore. Intellectual, culturally rich – a place that can take you anywhere in middle Europe, past or present. There it was again on the quieter side of the Vistula, in Stare Podgórze.

‘Paris is always a good idea,’ says the eponymous protagonist of Sabrina (1995). Like those Americans who long to go to Paris but make do in their glass skyscraper cities, I sit in a library in grimy Birmingham, looking out at our British concrete tower blocks – at least the Poles paint theirs – and I think of Kraków. Australia is my country and Kraków is my hometown.