Nowa Huta, a Stalinist development built in the 1940’s and meant to be an ideal communist worker’s town, is a suburb of Krakow. To help make Krakow more ‘proletarian’, the Soviets ordered the construction of a giant steel mill just outside of the city, despite Krakow not being near any major iron deposits, coal deposits, or heavy industry. Instead of a worker’s paradise, the concrete towers of Nowa Huta became a hotbed of Solidarity resistance in the 1980’s, and today the main square is named after Ronald Reagan instead of Lenin.
Local residents fought for years for the right to have a church, with running battles in the streets over wooden crosses that the devout would put up around town. In the 60’s, the authorities gave permission for a Catholic church to be built. The view seen here is the outside of that first church, called Arka Pana (the Lord’s Ark).
The area is still somewhat depressed, but parts are gentrifying rapidly. They’ve been able to attract exciting capitalist enterprises such as Philip Morris.
