Portal:Poland/Selected location/15
Nowa Huta is an industrial easternmost district of the city of Kraków. Its history began in 1949, when Poland's communist government started to build the Lenin Steelworks (now Tadeusz Sendzimir Steelworks owned by Mittal Steel Company) together with a town for the workers. Nowa Huta, whose name translates as "New Steelworks", was meant to be an ideal socialist and atheist proletarian town supposed to counterbalance Kraków's conservative bourgeoisie. It is Poland's foremost example of socialist realist urban planning and architecture. The workers eventually turned against the communist regime when they demanded – with the help of Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II – the right to build a church in the 1960s; and when they supported the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. (Full article...)