Until the 15th century Lodz was a tiny village in the very centre of Poland. Although it was granted the city rights in 1423, finally in the 19th century it did develop as a town of textile industry. Lodz owes its industrial prosperity to German, Russian, Jewish and Polish manufacturers who invested their capital here and associated their lives with the town. They all found this new place of living tase like "the Promised Land" Lodz was growing with emerging factories, residential quaters for factory workers as well as magnificent villas and palaces for factory owners.
A dynamic development of Lodz was stopped 1914 by the First World War, and as a result of purposeful devastation of machines and equipment the economic continuity of the town's development was broken for many years. Another German occupation again wrecked achievements of the city, which already in 1939, at the start od the Second World War, was incorporated within the borders of the Third Reich. At that time Lodz lost over 60 percent od ots inhabitants. |
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Nowadays Lodz is the second largest city in Poland, famous for its Film Academy and one of the largest streets- eclectic Piotrkowska Street, part of which is paved with bricks bearing names of Lodz citizens. Piotrkowska Street is well known not only due to its lenght and art nouveau mansion houses but also thanks to more than a hundred pubs, restaurant and café gardens.
In Lodz there is a splendid Museum of Modern Art, Museum od Textile Industry, the greatest in Europe monumental complex of factory premises and residential buildings called Księży Młyn and a unique Jewish cemetery. Here you can find theatres, cinemas, concert hall, banks, departament stores, modern culture, entertiment and trade centre called Manufaktura, 6 public higher education institutions with 65,000 and 15 private universities with over 50,000 students. There is also Technical University of Lodz - more than 60 years of scientific research, teaching, inventions, praiseworthy graduates and their exquisite lecturers. |
