Those were the days when Kraków’s veins were running with coal and steel and the glorious, royal past of the city didn’t matter anymore. The world was on the eve of the Cold War and Nowa Huta, communist district of Kraków, was built to fight and resist it.
Visit with us Nowa Huta, one of the two still existing ideal communist cities in the world and get a chance to:
- see the monumental headquarters of the steel plant and communist party offices
- enter original bomb shelters and command center from the 1950s, where everything remained untouched as a testimony to the times of the Cold War
- see the representative part of Nowa Huta – monumental Central Square and the Avenue of Roses,
- visit the housing units designed to create new socialist inhabitants and a new model of life
- enter the ‘Ark of Lord’ church, a symbol of spiritual resistance of Catholic workers against the communist party will and finally have a communist-style snack in the original period interiors
Nowa Huta was a place that had to realize Joseph Stalin’s vision of a communist utopia and help him to win the Cold War. An ideal communist city, monumental and grand was built in a country that had just started to raise itself from the rubble of World War II. But, for the Communist Party, the costs of its construction were meaningless. Tangible proof of communist power was the only thing that mattered.
This ideal city, where religion was replaced with communist propaganda was supposed to be inhabited by ideal communist citizens: Homo Sovieticus. A new and better type of people, obedient, brainwashed and entirely devoted to the system. They were to replace the old chaotic, stubborn, free-willed and creative Homo Sapiens. But, nothing lasts forever. Eventually, the creatures turned against their masters. The people of Nowa Huta revolted and fought for freedom.
Join us and we will tell you the story of a heroic struggle of Polish workers, initiators of great strikes and protests that eventually started the fall of a Communist Block, and the beginnings of the biggest social movement of all times – Solidarity. All this in the surroundings of one of the best examples of an ideal communist city, which today, surprisingly, has so much to offer.
