So it has stopped raining, we got the car to visit Nowa Huta, the giant steel furnaces as extensive as the city of Krakow, made by Communists and now owned by Mittal, like so many steel mills in the world. They did so in Krakow for ideological reasons, because from an economic point of view or logistics should have been made in Silesia or at the border of the Soviet Union. They wanted to bring thousands of immigrants who dilute cults and religious people of Krakow, reluctance of the Communist party. Les sounds, this tactic of dictatorships of all time?
Nowa Huta is a neighborhood built between 1949 and 1951 for workers in this industry. It was a model of urban planning, with living conditions far superior to those of workers who are then accumulated in the suburbs of large Western cities, for example in Barcelona, in shacks or huts without services. The urban design of Nowa Huta, designed as a new city of 200,000 about 110 km2 -an area bigger than Barcelona-, remains a model. The architecture is something different: there are the classic examples of "Soviet realism", inspired by the classic Renaissance but to configure the new communist society without classes, without presence of any religion.
There would go into the farmers who migrate to the city to work in the new steel factory, not contaminated of the population of Cracow, educated according to the forms prior to communism. But the new immigrants leaded a role in the fight 60 years to have a Catholic church, defending a fixed cross in the street when Karol Wojtyla was Bishop of Krakow. He consecrated the church of the Ark of the Lord in 1977, shortly before being named pope. And he wanted to visit it in their first trip outside Rome, in 1978.
Later, Nowa Huta was a bastion of trade union Solidarnosc, which was decisive for the collapse of the communist dictatorship in Poland and the world.
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