Krakowiak

The Krakowiak is a fast, syncopated Polish dance in duple time from the region of Krakow and Little Poland. This dance is known to imitate horses, the steps mimic their movement, for horses were well loved in the Krakow region of Poland for their civilian as well as military use. It became a popular ballroom dance in Vienna ("Krakauer") and Paris ("Cracovienne")—where, with the polonaise and the mazurka, it signalled a Romantic sensibility of sympathy towards a picturesque, distant, and oppressed nation—and in Russia, a krakoviak is featured in Mikhail Glinka's A Life for the Tsar (1836).