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Katowice In Your Pocket

Katowice In Your Pocket
After taking a short one year hiatus from the editorial chair of IYP, I’m back in Silesia and after a look around it seems like I must have Rip Van Winkled myself away for longer than I realised. It has to be said, I like what they’re doing with the place. Silesia is making strides. Slow, loping, sometimes stumbling strides, but strides that are nonetheless propelling it forward. At the heart of the Silesia Conglomeration you have Katowice, where the continuing progress is perhaps most evident, in fact it will grab the attention of travellers as soon as they get off the train. While we don’t necessarily endorse turning downtowns into enormous shopping malls, there is no doubt in our minds that whatever fills the gigantic crater where the Katowice train station used to be (see Arrival & Transport, page 8) will be a helluva lot better than the former Katowice train station. Katowice’s other big projects are the construction of the new Silesian Museum on the grounds of the former ‘Katowice’ coal mine, which has been an inaccessible blemish on the city’s landscape for years, and the renovation of the modernist monstrosity known as the Silesian Press House (ul. Młynska 1) into something that the municipality will be proud to make its headquarters someday; and which marks the first phase of transforming Katowice’s market square into...an actual market square. Though the results of these projects won’t be borne out anytime soon, they’re further proof that things are progressing positively. In the year I have been away from Katowice, the city has spruced itself up by launching a successful City Garden (Miasto Ogrodów) campaign and hosted its first Street Art Festival. The city’s live music scene has also developed with a number of new venues, and November’s Ars Cameralis festival (see Events) is only going to further prove that Katowice has a better music scene than Krakow and Wrocław. Mariacki has turned into a bona fide high street and there are more places worth recommending for eats and drinks than we’ve ever put into words before. The good times aren’t constrained to the Silesian capital either, and within this guide you’ll find us detailing venues all over the region, so check the addresses of listings to see where we’ve been. In summation, the Silesia Conglomeration is improving fast and so is our guide. So make like Paris Hilton (who stayed at the Monopol in October 2011) and check it out.


A little bit of background to Katowice to get you started

One of Poland's least known and most surprising destinations, Katowice is a relatively young, predominantly working class city with a history tied up with the extraction of coal and other manly pursuits. Beginning life as a small, German-speaking town called Kattowitz in the early part of the 19th century, Katowice was incorporated within the borders of a new post-WWI Polish state, and thanks to its disparate racial and cultural heritage offers visitors a fascinating jumble of German Gothic, inter-war Art Nouveau and some shockingly different socialist architecture, all intermingled with a growing number of glistening capitalist palaces. Currently reinventing itself as a serious business destination and sadly ignored as a place to visit for any other reason, a sneaky glimpse under the cultural carpet reveals among other delightful surprises Poland's largest cathedral, one the best museums in the south of the country, a vast park filled with truly magnificent things to see and do, a bar scene to shame many of the country's so-called cutting edge cities and a reinforced concrete building that looks like a spaceship and that plays music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Marvellous.

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