WHEN I told my friends about my recent European getaway, many met me with two questions in quick succession: firstly, “Where?” and then pointedly “Why?”
I’m not surprised. I hadn’t heard of the city – a two-and-a-half-hour flight from London – until I decided to whisk my wife away on a romantic weekend there. What I found was meals out for less than £10, posh Airbnbs for only £50-a-night, and drinks at about half the price we pay at home.
In recent years, we’ve had weekend breaks in Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Vienna, Lisbon, Rome and Amsterdam – but they can often feel too big to truly explore over a weekend.
Add in long airport journey times, expensive hotels and pricey restaurants, and you come home knackered and empty pocketed.
Increasingly, I’ve found that it’s simply more enjoyable to head somewhere smaller: instead of Paris, try Toulouse; instead of Barcelona, try Grenada. So, when we decided on a trip to Poland, we picked a trip to Lublin, rather than Warsaw or Krakow.
We wanted to go on a “couple weekend” – like a date night for married people, but conducted over 48 hours somewhere well away from home.
Except for Vienna, all our previous minibreaks were in Western Europe – this time, we wanted something more exotic, perhaps to the East or North.
Plus, we were seriously skint. Anything in Scandinavia was prohibitively expensive.
One friend had just been to the chic Arctic Circle town of Tromso in Norway and warned: “For even a very average bottle of wine in a bog standard restaurant you are looking at eighty quid”.
I thought he must have mis-typed, but no, that number did indeed have a Y on the end – eighty.
So Norway was out. Sweden and Finland didn’t sound much better when it came to price.
So when a friend suggested an affordable alternative, Poland, I was interested. Which is how we came to settle on Lublin.
In the east of the country, with a population of around 327,000, Lublin is closer to the border with Ukraine than the capital, Warsaw.
The city featured prominently in one of our favourite films of last year, A Real Pain, which won Kieran Culkin a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
It came across as both fascinating and charming.
We then found we could get a smart Airbnb double room in the heart of this pretty city for £50 a night – and return flights out of Luton on Wizz Air for just £37 each. Sold!
Lublin is a tiny airport – just four gates – so easy and quick to navigate, then there’s a little single carriage tram-like train to ferry you very cheaply the few miles into the city to find that double room.
Our rental was an absolute steal for the price: views from two large windows looking directly at the dramatic castle with ramparts that dominate the old town, and it also features as a backdrop in A Real Pain
A bottle here for the price of a glass there
The food and drink were a steal too; the wine in particular was a lot, lot cheaper than you’d find in the UK.
A bottle here for the price of a glass there.
In both restaurants, the food was less than half the price for something comparable at home – generous mains for under a tenner.
In fact, everything from Uber rides to gallery tickets seemed to have this “less than half” aspect, which left us thinking it might be even more financially advantageous to simply move here.
Lublin was beautiful, intense, constantly interesting and surprisingly romantic- but also very, very cheap – perfect for the couple with no money.
Even though Lublin is the largest city in eastern Poland, there are far fewer crowds than Krakow, making it the ideal family destination too.
Of course, we wanted to check out the locations features in A Real Pain too.
The film, a mix of comedy and tragedy, told the story of two cousins, Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, visiting the city where their Jewish grandmother had grown up before being caught up in – and narrowly escaping – the Holocaust.
That historic atrocity looms large in Lublin.
Until 1939, the city was one of the great Jewish centres in all of Europe, comparable to Oxford for its cultural reach.
First, we headed to the Old Jewish Cemetery – but it was closed for the sabbath so we could only peer in at the atmospheric stone monuments.
At a hotel around the corner, a travel group leader told me that the building had been the largest Jewish academy in the world when it opened in 1930.
But barely a decade later, its entire library burned in what is now the hotel carpark and its students were systematically slaughtered.
Just outside Lublin is a concentration camp, Majdanek, where 78,000 died.
But of course, it wasn’t just Polish Jews who were murdered.
Outside that cemetery, for example, a sign proclaimed: “This place is hallowed by the blood of Poles, prisoners of Lublin Castle, executed by the Nazis on 23 December 1939.”
The fairytale castle we were looking at from our room had a dark past.
The other film location we tried was a restaurant, Mandragora, in the old town, where Culkin’s character plays the piano.
On our visit to this delightfully old-fashioned place, there was also music, from a small band with accordion, fiddle and clarinet that seemed to give a pre-war atmosphere.
Even more retro-atmospheric was a restaurant not in the film, Zaczarowana, where a gothic interior of shadows, black curtains and candlelight made it feel like we were on the set of some composite film mash-up of the Frankenstein and Dracula stories.
Like travelling back in time
There’s lots to see in the city too.
If travelling with kids, you can head to the Open Air Village Museum, which is an immersive museum with historic farmhouses and of course, farm animals too.
There’s also a water fountain and light show in Litewski Square to watch in awe.
In the Old Town you will find pastel coloured houses, neatly lined up and there is also the castle – one of the oldest royal castles in the country – which has great views across the city.
According to Backpack Adventures, it is even like “travelling back in time” with a number of gates leading onto narrow alleys.
The city has over 150 trolleybuses to get around the city, which were introduced back in 1953.
And it is the perfect time to visit, as the city has been named one of Europe’s Capitals of Culture for 2029.
Hungry? Head to U Szewca in the Old Town, where you an discover a pub with sport-themed rooms, pizza for just £6 and Bolognese for around £7.50, and a beer for about £4.25.
When it comes to grabbing something to drink, head to Nocny Portier where you will find “upside-down pot plants, absurd monkey portraiture and terrific cocktails from a movie-inspired menu”, according to The Times.
You even need a password to head downstairs to the speakeasy and once inside, you will be able to grab a cocktail for just £6 delivered on a toy railway.
For more cheap European getaways, these are the cheapest European cities to fly to this year according to the experts – with loads of flights from £15.
Plus, these are Europe’s top 20 cheapest beach resorts.