Nowa Huta

Nowa Huta-strictly a workers' city-was built in the early 1950's as a leading construction project of communism in Poland.
It was situated near Krakow, one of the oldest Polish cities.
Krakow is also a center for the Polish intelligentsia, whom the communists hated and considered inconvenient, so that Nowa Huta was supposed to be a form a workers' opposition to them.
Thousands of young people from all parts of Poland came to the building site of housing developments and the Lenin Steel Mill.
Nowa Huta had a special task to stay modern through and through, a communistic city without God, with the biggest communist party organization in Poland.
But the vision built on the foundations of Soviet ideology was destroyed.
The inhabitants forced the authorities to build churches, and from the year 1980 onward, Nowa Huta started to be a bastion of anti-communism.
At present, Nowa Huta is a disintegrating "bedroom" of Krakow, and there are mass dismissals from work.
Accustomed to being under the care of the steel mill, once upon a time the biggest employer in Poland, former steelworkers cannot find themselves in contemporary reality.
The builders of Nowa Huta, even those who excelled most at their work, now cannot guarantee themselves the basics of everyday existence.
Young people, the third and fourth generations of this peculiar melting-pot which resulted from the influx of people from all parts of Poland, still cannot find their own identity.

Nowa Huta-Krakow, Poland February 1999-November 2000