A colliery that built a town
Nikiszowiec was never planned as a district of a city. It was built as housing for the workforce of a single enterprise by the mining company Georg von Giesches Erben, for the men of the Giesche colliery, renamed Wieczorek after 1945. The name comes from the Nickisch shaft nearby.
The design dates from 1908 and is the work of two cousins, Emil and Georg Zillmann of Berlin-Charlottenburg, who had already built the neighbouring estate of Giszowiec for the same company. The two are deliberate opposites: Giszowiec a garden village of detached cottages among trees, Nikiszowiec dense, urban and built of dark brick.
The first block was occupied in 1911 and the last finished only after the First World War. The original scheme was never completed — the planned estate park, for one, was never laid out. Construction was overseen by Anton Uthemann, the company's director.
How it works as a piece of architecture
The estate covers around 15 hectares and consists of nine blocks, each a closed perimeter building with a courtyard inside. More than a thousand mining families lived here. A standard flat had two rooms and a kitchen in about 63 square metres; the smaller type gave a room, an alcove and a kitchen in roughly 53. One lavatory was usually shared between two households, and the bath house and laundry served the whole estate.
The facades were left as bare brick, and that is where the effect comes from: one colour throughout, an even rhythm of windows, and yet a surprising amount of detail — oriels, arched passageways, varied brick bonds, different window surrounds from block to block. The Zillmanns avoided monotony without using ornament.
The layout was meant to be self-contained. Company shops, an inn, two schools and the church stood on the square, while the largest courtyard held the boiler house, the baths and laundry, the offices and a hostel for single men. The walk to work took minutes, since the pit was across the street.
The square and St Anne's church
The elongated Wyzwolenia square is the only substantial opening in the dense fabric, and it still functions as the estate's marketplace and meeting point. Because it is not a regular rectangle and the blocks close it at different angles, it looks different from every approach.
Above it rises St Anne's church, a neo-baroque mass in the same dark brick, also designed by the Zillmanns. Begun in 1914, interrupted by the war and by postwar inflation, it was finished only in 1927. It is far larger than the local population would have required, and among the housing blocks it reads almost like a cathedral dropped into a courtyard.
The wash house museum and the Janów painters
The former laundry, mangle room and bath house on Rymarska street has housed the ethnology department of the Katowice History Museum since 2011; before that, from 1996, it held the Magiel gallery. Its displays cover everyday life on the estate: a reconstructed miner's flat, the working year of a household, family and church ritual.
A second permanent exhibition is devoted to the Janów Group, a circle of self-taught painters, all of them miners at the Wieczorek pit, which formed in the colliery's club room just after the Second World War. The best known was Teofil Ociepka, an engineman at the pit power station whose fantastical, occult-tinged canvases place him alongside Nikifor as Poland's foremost naive painter. Lech Majewski told the group's story in his film Angelus.
Protection, events and getting there
- Heritage register — the street layout was listed in 1978 and the buildings themselves in 2013.
- Historic Monument of Poland — by presidential regulation of 14 January 2011.
- Industrial Monuments Route — a member since 2006, along with Giszowiec and dozens of other Silesian industrial sites.
- Markets — the pre-Christmas craft market on the square is the best-known event, with a summer counterpart tied to the feast of St Anne.
- Getting there — a few kilometres east of central Katowice along Szopienicka street; buses run to the estate and take about twenty minutes.
- Please note — the estate is lived in. Courtyards are private, so visitors keep to the streets and the public passageways.
How to get there and practical info
- Location
- eastern Katowice, Janów-Nikiszowiec district, on Szopienicka and Zamkowa streets
- Built
- designed 1908, built from 1911 into the 1920s; architects Emil and Georg Zillmann
- Size
- about 15 hectares, nine closed blocks with inner courtyards
- Protection
- Historic Monument of Poland since 14 January 2011; street layout in the heritage register since 1978
- Highlights
- Wyzwolenia square, St Anne's church, the museum in the old wash house, the archways and courtyards
- Time needed
- two hours for the estate, three with the museum
- Nearby
- Giszowiec, the Wieczorek colliery, Szopienice, the Industrial Monuments Route
- Current hours and tickets
- the estate is made up of public streets and is free to walk; exhibition times are published by the Katowice History Museum
When to go
Trees come into leaf in the courtyards, and pale foliage against dark brick is the view photographers come for.
The easiest season for the walk between Nikiszowiec and Giszowiec; July brings the parish feast of St Anne.
Mist and wet brickwork, when the estate looks most like the paintings the Janów miners made of it.
The pre-Christmas market fills the square: the busiest and the most crowded moment of the year here.
Other sights in Silesian Voivodeship
Straight-line distances from „Nikiszowiec" — calculated from real coordinates. By road it is often further.
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