Wojciech Wilczyk

Black and White Silesia

It was in the early spring of 1992 that I saw the ‘Walenty’ cokery for the first time. Driving through the never-ending Ruda Śląska, I was on my way to Bytom, when – all of a sudden – enormous concrete structures hidden behind a tangle of pipelines started to emerge on the left side of the road. It was an early dark-gray afternoon with a spring drizzle and the damp concrete buildings, seen through the windows of my car, reminded me of a setting to one of these science-fiction films with the action taking place at the moment of an inevitable collapse of civilization. At that time, I had no idea what kind of an industrial building I was watching. Silos ended with a flatten cone and standing on many legs, vertical blackened tanks, and a multi-storey bunker looking together like a castle from a dream of some frantic industrialist (that’s what I thought of them then), flitted quickly as I was driving my car.

A view weeks later, choosing purposely a similarly rainy day, I set off for Ruda Śląska. Having parked my car in some distance from the concrete complex, I entered it through a hole in a solid fence made of metal rods. There was an eerie animation there. Although I took my camera out of the bag and started taking pictures immediately, nobody paid any attention to me. A substantial group of dirty men was occupied with stripping down everything that was easy to be demolished. It looked a bit like a community of ants taking action when they come into contact with some dead animal, which is more and more popular in wildlife documentaries. Some ants unscrewed everything that was able to do so with adjustable spanners and pulled out everything that was able to do so with crowbars. Other ants were responsible for transport. Pipes, screws, valves, angle bars in various seizes, window frames, and other pieces of scrap iron were carried off on their back or in prams. Fascinated by the outstanding appearance of those demolished to some extent, industrial installations, I had began taking pictures when somebody (an ant?) standing behind my back whispered into my ear: ‘Take my advice and you’d better stop shooting; otherwise they will kick your ass.’

 

Next time I left for Ruda Śląska very early. It was a doubly right decision, since the premises of the mysterious cokery was completely deserted. The heaps of ruble and slack, the demolished installations, and –at last- those enormous concrete silos standing on eight, or maybe on even ten legs, were remarkably illuminated by the rising sun. Having unfolded my tripod and mounted my camera, I started photographing. Coming closer and further, altering the perspective in search for interesting shots, I realised that some of the elements of that industrial landscape, which I had seen several weeks earlier, had vanished. I had, however, no chance to ponder it, because from the corner of my eye I discerned two silhouettes in navy uniforms of industrial guard approaching me very quickly. It goes without saying that those two men were not satisfied with my photographic activity within that site. After a little conversation and a couple of – in fact - pretty inoffensive attempts to intimidate me, I was led to a lodge. They took my ID number and escorted me to the hole I had entered the site through. The lodge was rather a typical object, made of hardboard and called colloquially ‘melamina’ (equipped with an old-fashioned telephone and a cast-iron stove called ‘koza’). It was placed next to a former administration facility, which had already been devoid of windows, and where I saw a rusty sign with the words curved out of thick metal sheets: ’The Zabrze Cokery Complex – The Walenty Cokery’.

Over the following years, I would often go to photograph ‘Walenty’. At that time, all the metal installations were first to be stripped down. Then some bulldozers demolished a monumental line of light-yellow clinker-clad batteries of the cokery and they subsequently cut into a building from the beginning of the last century (it must have served as a technological facility); and at that very moment – for unclear reasons to me - that scheduled demolition was ceased for several years. The lodge disappeared, and bunches of scrap collectors - having no problem at any time of day or night - would dig up the ground, would hammer into the walls of the buildings, and would devastate the construction of the concrete silos in search for various kinds of metal elements. We avoided each other. The site of the cokery was rapidly covered with wild plants. There were gigantic grasses swaying in the most stinking and contaminated places. The piles of rubble and post-industrial ash were rapidly covered with undemanding birches, aspens and alders. After several years, only the eight- and ten-legged bunkers dominated over the immensity of vibrating greenery during the summer months.

 

Going to take pictures of ‘Walenty’, I would take the road from Tychy. After bypassing in Mikołów, I entered the road leading to Gliwice and Borowa Wieś, and then I turned right in the direction of Ruda. After passing a tiny grove, the road crossed a bunch of four-storey blocks of flats from the Gomułka epoch, behind which the chimneys and the cold storages of a power plant started to appear, followed by the hoist towers of the ‘Halemba’ mine. That small housing estate, bearing no difference to other such places in Poland, turned rapidly into the suburbs comprising boxy semi-detached houses surrounded by gardens. The majestic silhouette of the ‘Bielszowice’ mine emerged behind them on the left side, and soon after it vanished veiled by an ascent. At that point, the road crossed the railway to Katowice, which was a threshold to the areas of superior urban development in Wirek and Nowy Bytom. I would take this road many times, so I noticed that some of historical apartment houses had been deserted for some time. The windows in the stripe of the ground floor had been already bricked up while the ones of the upper levels were being deprived of frames step by step. The façades of those buildings bespoke their nineteenth-century origin, and one could notice Sezession ornaments, shyly exposing themselves from the underneath of flaking emulsion paint.

 

The urban layout of both districts, which I would watch through the windows of my car during those transit drives in the direction of ‘Walenty’ and subsequently Zabrze, Ruda, Bytom, Bobrek or Chebzie, attracted my attention in a misterious way every time. Yet, it was not until some time passed that I decided, prompted by a mysterious impulse, to turn down some back road finding myself in a strange territory. Since the back roads lack signs, I was driving straight ahead, directed only by my intuition and the appearance of the places I was passing by. Heading towards the conspicuous body of a blast furnace, I found myself, after a while of wandering backroads and detours, on the site of a worker settlement located precisely on the opposite side of the ‘Peace’ steelworks (I didn’t know the name of it at that time). Behind an area between a row of the archaic tenement blocks in Niedurny street and the more representational buildings adjacent to a no longer existing train station, there was an empty space spreading out. Yet, the streets paved with granite and remains of pavements bespoke that the houses once used to be there. The embankment of a narrow railway crossing the site, the abutments of defunct bridges, and the lines of damaged concrete-slab fences bespoke a strong connection of that place to the steelworks.

 

Using a method of travelling at random, exposed above (a substantially amorphous shape of the Upper Silesia agglomeration is good for such a procedure), I quickly found the way, for instance, to Stary Chorzów - a town located at the back of - at that time functioning - the ‘Kościuszko’ steelworks; to the famous Wytrwali Street going through a rustic estate in the direction of the ‘Bobrek’ steelworks; to Lipiny Śląskie, or to Piekarska Street in Zabrze-Porębie where Horst Eckert (Janosh) was born in one of the archaic tenement houses. Obviously I would take pictures then, but those were rather ‘artistic photographs’ of shadows on the walls. Therefore, I would search for places with light plaster surfaces determinedly, which is rather a difficult endeavor in Silesia where the facades of houses are mainly made of brick. Yet, chasing shadows, I began to realise the kind of a process taking place in these industrial cities and housing estates. The state of stagnation after the political transformation in 1989 was definitely over in the second half of the nineties. I witnessed - for instance – the pulling down of a whole quarter of buildings between Mickiewicz and Prus Street in Bytom. The same happened to the nineteenth-century tenement blocks in Szafranka Street. The pretty archaic yet fascinating Bishop Musialik Street leading to Brzeziny began to resemble the state of dentition of a patient suffering from periodontosis.

In December 1999, when I went to Katowice’s district Załęże in order to take pictures of Wąska Street sited at the back of the ‘Baildon’ steelworks, the demolition of buildings was in progress. The historical tenement blocks built in the nineteenth century were being bulldozed in the cloud of brick ash and with the accompaniment of crashing ceilings. That place, which I would pass many times during my transit drives from Katowice to Chorzów, always attracted my attention. Nevertheless, then in the spring of 1999, nothing (at least for me) had indicated that total destruction, although I had made a had noted in my memory that the windows of the ground floor were blind. Cats were mooning lazily around on the street lit up by the April shine, children were playing in the thickets of elderberry growing at the fence of the steelworks, and men from the Romanian families dwelling there were sitting on the low thresholds of gates. The row of the identical tenement blocks located in the adjacent Bocheński Street was stripped of windows, but there were still gaudy advertisements changed on the billboards mounted on the gables of the buildings. The interiors of those houses had been already stripped of all metal elements (which can be sold for scrap) and in some of them one had even cut out enormous beams.

But it was not until the beginning of February in the millennial year of 2000 that I went to Katowice, Chorzów and Bytom with a more specific plan of photographing Upper Silesia. I was very excited visiting all the familiar places mentioned above during that first journey. Starting from Stary Chorzów and Maria Rodziewiczówna Street leading to a one-hundred-year-old power plant and some houses adjacent to the former ‘Królewska’ steelworks (I was changing rolls of films like mad), I rushed to Nowy Bytom and the demolished tenement blocks vis-a-vis the ‘Pokój’ steelworks; then I got back to Lipiny Śląskie and soon went to Bobrek to Wytrwali Street and to Bytom to Musialik Street. The journey ended up in Załęże where I encountered... an empty space formed as a result of the destruction of an entire row of houses in Bocheński Street. After that first, a bit chaotic journey, I started to visit Silesia in a more arranged way, choosing the places where I could make a photographic record of motifs bearing features of typology (that’s what I was thinking then). But I don’t remember precisely whether it was in Bytom, Chorzów, or rather in Stary Chorzów when enchanted by the appearance of a typical Silesian courtyard while looking for the most satisfactory perspective to take a picture, I went upstairs in a wing of a building and out of the window I saw the city in a completely different, unfamiliar shape to me.

Using the method “at random” (although I was already quite familiar with a local topography), climbing the steps of hundreds of stairways, walking on the traces of no longer existing streets and tracks of liquidated local railway lines, I often found myself in places looking almost as if they had not been altered since an epoch of rapid industrialization one hundred years ago (provided that one removes all cars, streetlights, shop signs, billboards and contemporary passers-by from the street). At the time however, the site of the ‘Walenty’ cokery (conquered temporarily by wild plants) had turned into a dump of stone dug out of the mines, and by March 2002, those characteristic concrete silos dominating over the surrounds were blown up. The same happened to the almost identical structures of the cokery complex in Gliwice. Closed twelve years ago, a machinery part of the ‘Królewska’ steelworks has being stripped down by scrap collectors step by step; and this process, which had been intensified recently, is bound to lead to destruction. While the turbines of a new power plant were being erected, an entire quarter of the one-hundred-year buildings along Maria Rodziewiczówna Street were pulled down. Built a view years ago in the centre of Nowy Bytom, a trashy hypermarket has completely blurred a carefully planned urban layout of the city. A new cross-town motorway leading from Katowice, which is under construction now (according to the local authorities it is expected to stimulate an economic growth in this area), is going to incorporate these old tenement blocks crouched along the cobbled Piekarska Street in Zabrze-Poręba.

Although the liquidation of industry, all the industrial installations and housing estates in Upper Silesia is a result of economic circumstances, it is also accompanied by a vast, vacuous destruction of many industrial landmarks. It must, however, be said that the process of destruction had began much earlier. The implementation of socialist rules of economy had led coal and heavy industry to a state of technological hibernation. After a free-market ‘thaw’, this industry started to decay immediately. It was during a vast economic waste of the Gierek epoch that those awful concrete multi-storey blocks of flats were erected at anywhere, destroying the logical and coherent layout of Silesian cities. After all – the symbiosis of the city and industry entailed practical solutions. Coal mines and steel mills were accompanied by workers’ houses built according to appropriate architectonic regulations. Such settlements were linked by transport routes. There were railroads and tramlines built. Coal mine and steelworks settlements expanded, constituting a denser urban organism. In the course of a so-called ‘Silesian boom’ from the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, the urban development in the towns was already in progress. The north quarters of Bytom, where these remarkable buildings with Sezession ornaments on their facades are located (remaining me of Prenzlauerberg in Berlin), where carried out with references to the idea of a garden city.

About a year ago, I was showing a group of Swiss filmmakers around the site of the former cokery in the ‘Królewska’ steelworks (they were seeking for industrial scenery in Poland); enchanted by what they had experienced, both the director and the cameraman were talking all the time about…’the ambience of ancient ruins’. Yet, this kind of attitude towards post-industrial buildings and the entire urban structure of the Upper Silesia agglomeration is still exceptional in our society. The nineteenth-century industrialism has become an awkward issue as well, which is surprising regarding the fact that we still benefit from this ‘ugly’ and ‘sad’ industrial epoch.

Preface from the album “Black-and-White Silesia”,

transl. Patrycja Sajdak