Zinar Castle

A living legend of communism. The flagship building from the time when Comrade Stalin was watching over the Kremlin. Nevertheless, it is worth looking at Nowa Huta differently - as a well-designed, functional city with a long, sometimes dramatic history that goes back much further than just the last century.

In the 1950s, in former agricultural areas a new city was established east of Krakow. It happened as a result of Joseph Stalin's "proposal" to build a large metallurgical plant.

Various locations were considered, but it was finally decided that the country's largest plant, together with a model socialist city, would be built in Mogiła near Krakow.

The local population has been farming for centuries, and the traces of settlement in these areas date back several thousand years BC (it is here that the oldest gold product in Poland was found - an earring from around 2000 BCE). Here, probably in the 7th or 8th century, a mysterious Wanda Mound was built, allegedly dedicated to the daughter of the city's founder.

Here we can also see one of the oldest Krakow churches. In the early Middle Ages, Cistercians settled in Mogiła, establishing a church and a monastery, which soon became one of the most popular sanctuaries in Poland. For many years, it was the only temple in the atheistic - as assumed by the communist authorities - Nowa Huta.

Geographical and demographic reasons, but also - and perhaps above all - political reasons spoke for the location of the construction of the huge conglomerate. The group of the working class was to change the ideological face of Krakow, considered by the communist authorities as a bastion of political reaction with the overwhelming influence of the intelligentsia and the Catholic Church.

Dig for the first building in Nowa Huta (block at ul. Mierzwy 14, as Today, a commemorative plaque) was made on June 23, 1949, when Wanda's name day falls on the calendar. One of the tasks assigned to the new city was to educate an atheistic society. Wanting to oppose pagan heroin to Catholic saints, everything that was possible was called by her name. Wanda has her monument (on the mound) in Nowa Huta, as well as a housing estate, a stadium and a department store.

A little later, on April 26, 1950, the first worker started building the steelworks, soon named after Włodzimierz Lenin. In the record year of 1977, the metallurgical juggernaut reached its apogee in the amount of production (6.7 million tons of steel per year), employment (38 thousand workers) and ... poisoning the environment.

According to the ideology of socialist realism, art was to be "Socialist in content and national in form." The following survived the conflagration of war: Renaissance Krakow, as well as Zamość and Kazimierz on the Vistula, the Renaissance was recognized as our "national form" and it was decided to build Nowa Huta in this style. The new city was built by outstanding urban planners brought up in respect for classical models. The heart of the new city was to be the central square, modeled on the Greek agora, where public life took place. Housing estates and the most important party buildings, headed by the party City Committee, were to be built around it. The project was not completed until the end.

Currently, 5 main arteries radiate from the Central Square (the main square of Nowa Huta), between which there are quarters marked with successive letters of the alphabet - intimate mini-towns, embedded in greenery and self-sufficient, what's more, they are equipped with air-raid shelters and have high defensive values. The Administrative Center of the former Huta im. Lenina (today ArcelorMittal Poland) - the buildings at the gates of the combine (ul. Ujastek 1) referring to the Renaissance are referred to by the locals as "the Doge's Palace" or "the Vatican".

Even in the 1950s in Nowa The steelworks opened to this day, the Ludowy Theater (34 Teatralne housing estate) and two twin cinemas: Świt (10 Teatralne housing estate) and Światowid (Centrum E-1 housing estate, where the Museum of the People's Republic of Poland is located today). Over time, the center of the socialist city was surrounded by other housing estates, which already reflect the typical stages of the Polish People's Republic architecture. On the other hand, Nowa Huta waited a long time for its own churches (for many years this function had to be performed by the Cistercian monastery). The first church in the working-class district of Krakow, the famous Lord's Ark, was built - and only thanks to the determination of the inhabitants - only in the years 1967-1977. nor keep it as a city without churches. During martial law, it was here that great demonstrations in defense of the outlawed "Solidarity" took place. The irony of history is that the architecture of Nowa Huta estates, adapted to defense in the event of a NATO attack, made it difficult for the militia to capture demonstrators ...

In 2004, the so-called "Stara Nowa Huta" was entered in the register of monuments of Krakow as a representative example of socialist realism urbanism in Poland.