Polish Towns Research Articles

Medieval and renaissance urban morphogenesis in eastern Poland

A survey of the literature on the development and morphology of Polish towns by archaeologists, planners, historians and geographers is followed by a detailed investigation of the chronology of urban development in the north-east portion of medieval Little Poland and its borderlands. The morphological evolution of the largest city in the region, Lublin, is accorded more detailed investigation. Particular attention is paid to the phases of planned growth, the burgage cycle of the later medieval plots and the development of characteristic building types, and the evolution of the inner fringe belt. The growth and development of Lublin contrasts with that of other Polish cities located further west.

Poland's Manchester: 19th-Century Industrial and Domestic Architecture in Lodz

So far, 19th-century architecture in any of the three parts of the divided country of Poland has received virtually no attention from Western (and that includes German) architectural or town-planning historians. Lodz was undoubtedly the most important Polish town developed in the 19th century. The rapidity of the growth, especially in the later 19th century, was astonishing even by western European standards; the degree of preservation of late-19th-century industrial buildings-understood to include not only factories, but also workers' dwellings and factory owners' mansions-is considerable. After examining more briefly the early development of the textile colonies, which were supported very much by the State, the article deals in more detail with large industrial buildings erected by the most important entrepreneurs, Scheibler and Poznański. An attempt is made to relate the particular configuration of workers' houses and mansions to the social set-up locally and generally.

Nowe Tychy: an assessment of a polish new town

No we Tychy is the most prominent and successful of the new towns in post‐war Poland. The paper describes the new town programme resulting from the Regional Plan for Upper Silesia and provides an appraisal of the town's achievement from the point of view of the residents’ living conditions, the usability of the housing stock and the spatial character of the town. The conclusions provide a critique of the process through which the town was developed and built.

Breaking of social barries as an expression of the emergence of a modern society in the mid-19th century: based on the example of selected Polish towns

Breaking of social barries as an expression of the emergence of a modern society in the mid-19th century: based on the example of selected Polish towns

Note sur le thème du siège triparti : Capitole, Narbonne et Głogów

Dans son ouvrage Archéologie de l'épopée médiévale, Joël H. Grisward constate :Corollairement, si la discordance des contenus exclut a priori la possibilité d'un emprunt, le parallélisme de structure entre les deux sièges — Capitule et Nerbona — laisse la porte ouverte à deux hypothèses : ou bien deux esprits ont, indépendamment l'un de l'autre, fabriqué le récit d'un siège en utilisant pour “modèle” la structure des trois fonctions, ou bien l'un et l'autre ont hérité d'une “littérature indo-européenne” comme un tout déjà constitué à travers diverses variantes, le thème du siège triparti. Peut-être n'est-il pas indifférent que les “historiens” de Rome aient reconstitué un siège trifonctionnel à partir d'unités discrètes ou qu'ils aient simplement historicisé un thème épique, un schéma épique préexistant. Seul l'apport de nouvelles données comparatives permettra de résoudre ce petit probleme.Aux descriptions des sièges du Capitole et de Narbonne, nous pouvons ajouter un troisième exemple : le compte rendu des tentatives de l'empereur Henri V pour conquérir la ville forte de Glogów, en Silésie, sur l'Oder.

Local Party Leaders in Poland

The composition of local elites and the recruitment methods that produced them help clarify the way a political system performs. Using data from six medium-sized Polish towns and two provinces gathered in the late 1970s, this article looks at the composition of local Polish United Workers party authorities and considers whether and to what degree party members differ in education, experience, and work models from other local leaders. The ways in which local power elites responded in the late 1970s to the technocratic goals set by central authorities made them targets of criticism, and help to explain the sweeping personnel changes that ensued after August 1980.

The balance of polish sea trade with the west, 1565–1646

Abstract The balance of trade is generally regarded as a major item only on an obsolete mercantilist agenda where it is discussed rather as an element in an abstract doctrine than as a real economic problem. Polish historians would follow the same line as their colleagues elsewhere if the economic situation of the Polish Commonwealth at the beginning of the seventeenth century did not compel them to lay emphasis on a supposed change in money flows. It has been established beyond doubt that the early seventeenth century was a most crucial period in Polish economic and socio-political development; its importance for Poland was much greater and more portentous than Ruggiero Romano has shown it to be for Western Europe.1 A deep crisis in the serf-labour economy, Polish towns and cities generally checked in their development, the state weak against external foes and its own magnates—these signa temporis were to continue to characterise Polish history until the final days of independence in the late eighteenth ...

Town dwellers versus village dwellers in Poland

After the second world war, the urban population of Poland was nearly double the pre-war level. In my researches into urbanization in Poland and into the assimilation of peasant groups to the urban milieu, I was struck by a characteristic phenomenon. My Warsaw respondents, both skilled and unskilled workers and even white-collar workers of peasant origin (the last-named to a lesser degree), complained of a prejudiced attitude towards them on the part of the traditionally urban population. Most of the complaints came from young unskilled workers who said that their factory mates, salesgirls in shops, people in trams, etc., disparaged and ridiculed them. This derogatory attitude of town dwellers towards the newcomers from the countryside was also reflected in the various nicknames which ridiculed their peasant origin, lack of breeding, and alleged lower level of intelligence in general. A quite different state of affairs prevailed in Opole Silesia, an area that is being rapidly urbanized; from the answers to my questions, addressed to workmen and graduate engineers from all parts of Poland who were rather new to the town, I concluded that they did not grasp my point; in any case the general opinion was that there was no prejudice against people of peasant origin. These observations made in two Polish urban centres suggest more general conclusions about the origin and persistence of the anti-peasant stereotype among Polish town dwellers, and also about the structure and character of the urban culture in which that stereotype is to be found. The subject has so far not been covered by any wider sociological investigation in Poland, but even so many hypotheses force themselves upon the researcher; these require verification by studies to be carried out in the various regions of Poland, differing

The origins of western and eastern Slav towns

One of the most controversial problems exercising historians in the period between the two world wars was the origin of the towns of Central and Eastern Europe, especially those of Poland and Ruthenia.1 Research into this question continued for many years to be exclusively the domain of historians, to be joined towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth by historians of law. For some time these last managed to impose their opinions on many of the current investigators. Starting from the assumptions of their own discipline, they claimed that the initial birth of towns in the region under discussion might be determined by establishing the date of the assigning of so-called 'town rights' to well-defined centres. Thus, for example, in Polish conditions this moment might in many cases have been the date of the investing of a rural settlement centre with the code known as the Magdeburg Law. The conclusion followed that the origins of the Polish towns could date back no further than the middle of the thirteenth century, resulting from German colonization, and first inhabited chiefly by settlers attracted to Poland from Germany by Polish sovereigns. This legal and dogmatic opinion concerning the origin of medieval towns was already opposed as early as 1893 by J. Flach, to be followed early in the 'twenties of our century by K. Tymieniecki. Among western scholars the eminent Belgian historian H. Pirenne expressed a similar view regarding the Slav towns. But the scarcity of written sources concerning the Slav towns in the period before the thirteenth century made a wider discussion of their beginnings impossible. Only with the development of archaeological research, growing considerably in the 'thirties of this century and particularly intensified during the last twenty years, could a new outlook on this exceedingly interesting problem become possible, opening new perspectives both in the history of early medieval Europe in general and in the development of Poland and the eastern Slavs in particular. Excavations carried out on many sites in

A Great Provincial

May 19, 1965, Maria D^browska died in Warsaw, a major writer and a moral force in her nation under several vastly different political regimes. Never an habituee of literary cafes, all through her life she remained a provincial in the same noble sense that Flaubert had been a provincial in France and Faulkner in the United States ? an uninhibited artist contributing to universal values, not as a cosmopolitan, only as a supremely civilized voice coming from a backwater. That salt-of-the earth quality of her work was never belied by the public attitudes of the frail looking woman; in an age of political promiscuity and moral indifference she grew into a monolithic figure respected by both friends and foes. D%browska was born in 1892 in Central Poland, near Kalisz, a Polish town mentioned by Ptolemy in the second century of our era as Calisia, a storage center on the Roman trading route called the Amber Trail. The fact of having been born into a family of country squires deep rooted in native history had some bearing on D^browska's formation as a writer. Indeed, not even two world wars, the German occupation and a Communist revolution succeeded in changing her world-outlook. A foreigner who would read her books could say that he really knew a certain type of Polish people, perhaps the best people, those with staying power. She entered the public scene early as a social worker, with the co operative movement as her main interest. One of her pamphlets at that time bore the title: On Everyday Work: the work and thought of Poland's upper class, not of finance and aristocracy, but of national leadership. Her mind was pragmatic, liberal, objective. Doctrines did not mean much to her. In an article published in 1935 on the Russian brand of socialism (Rozmyslania na czasie [Timely Reflections], Wiadomosci Literackie [Literary News]) that attitude was sharply out lined; political and economic theory, she maintained, is good if it in creases human well-being; well-being must never be limited to a

Deviation and Social Change in the Jewish Community of a Small Polish Town

Although hostile attitudes toward persons who forsook the Jewish community remained unchanged, the youth evidently no longer gave the same allegiance to the culture as their parents did. The most striking evidences were the decline of religious orthodoxy and attendance at meetings of Zionist organizations and decrease of arranged marriages. Most social change occurred in the lower class, since the social structure of the community was such that it made lower-class people more likely to engage in nonoconformist conduct.

Social Stratification of the Jewish Community in a Small Polish Town

The status pattern was based on occupation, money, learning, and lineage. No matter which of the above denominators is used, however, one finds with slight variations the same people on the same point of the social scale. Wealth alone did not assure a person of status. It was a source of prestige only in so far as it enabled a man to contribute to the welfare of the community. Since the value of money was unstable, it was expected that money would be used to obtain the greater and more lasting sources of status: learning and lineage.