Nowa Huta District Tour (Approximately 4 hours of walking
The Nowa Huta (New Steel) neighborhood is a unique place in Krakow and in Poland.
Designed and built as a brand new communist city in opposition to the old, traditional and conservative Krakow, offering a true Stalin era atmosphere.
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| Nowa Huta District Tour |
Huge steelworks and apartment buildings for workers, built in 1950 show a consistent vision of socialist realism architecture imported from the Soviet Union and enriched with national Polish style, by architects: Tadeusz Ptaszycki, Janusz Ingarden, Boleslaw Skrzybalski, and others.
Even being a very young Neighborhood, Nowa Huta has a lot of history -Created by the communist planners to bring the communist way of life to Krakow and build a new communist society. However, Nowa Huta residents and steel mill workers were the first to rebel against communism and fight for human rights and workers' rights in 1980. They defended the construction of the famous Our Lord's Church. Ark and organized numerous patriotic demonstrations, which usually ended in clashes with the communist police.
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We begin our tour of the Main Entrance Gate and its Administration Center. It is a great example of socialist architecture. Two office buildings on both sides of the gate imitating Polish Renaissance style architecture.
Our next stop will be at the Wanda and Willowe dwellings. You will see complete units with the entire housing infrastructure: buildings with apartments, schools, kindergartens, shops, parks and playgrounds, cultural centers, etc. They are fine examples of the architecture and thinking of their time.
We will then direct our steps to the center of Nowa Huta - the old Central Square and its surroundings. The Central Square, now the Ronald Reagan Central Square is the meeting point of the 5 main streets that connect different parts of the district. The monumental buildings around the Square are another great example of Stalin-era architecture.
Then we will direct our steps to Roses Alley (Aleja Roz) with a wide walk, a place where the Lenin monument was placed in 1973, becoming one of the most recognized places in the Nowa Huta neighborhood. Since there is no the monument now, let's turn our attention to large style apartment buildings around the promenade.
Next place to visit is the People's Theater (Ludowy Theatre) in Nowa Huta. During our walk we will observe the settlements and beautiful green areas around them. The theater is famous for its high-quality performances, actors and directors, and also for interesting social experiments with local subcultures. Our walk in Nowa Huta will be completed with a visit to Our Lord's Ark Church - a spiritual center for the residents of the neighborhood, since it had to defend its construction in 1960 and a starting point for the demonstrations in favor of Solidarity in 1980. We are going to see a small monument commemorating the victims of communism, at the place where Bogdan Wlosik, one of the protesting steelworkers was killed by the secret police. The church also contains an interesting set of the stations of the Passion of Christ that are an allegory of modern Polish history.
During these 4 hours you will see 40 years of history of Nowa Huta - from where communism started and where it was defeated...