Nikiszowiec Museum (Katowice History Museum)

Until the 1980s, women from Nikiszowiec carried baskets of bed linen here, scrubbed it on washboards in masonry troughs and ran it through an electric mangle. Today the old laundry at Rymarska 4 houses the City Ethnology Department of the Katowice History Museum, known locally simply as the Nikiszowiec museum. It is the best place to understand everyday life on Poland's most famous workers' estate.

History: from laundry to museum

Nikiszowiec was built in 1908–1919 for miners of the Giesche coal mine, to a design by Emil and Georg Zillmann of Charlottenburg. The flats had no bathrooms, so the company built a laundry with a mangle and drying room in the largest block of the estate. Women boiled their sheets in cauldrons using hot water piped from the mine's heating plant, then hung them up in their attics or on the laundry's upper floor. In 1996 the building became the Magiel Gallery, which collected keepsakes from local residents. The city bought it from the Wieczorek mine in 2005, and after renovation the Katowice History Museum opened its branch here on 8 April 2011.

What to see

• "Water and soap are the best whitener. In the Nikiszowiec laundry and mangle room" – an exhibition opened on 25 February 2013 and awarded the Sybilla 2013, Poland's main museum prize. It follows the whole routine: hauling the basket, washing on a washboard, drying and mangling, and finally packing the fresh linen wrapped in a cloth called a maglownik.
• "U nos w doma na Nikiszu" ("At home in Nikisz", in Silesian dialect) – a miner's flat in three rooms (kitchen and two living rooms) with original furnishings, shortlisted for the Sybilla 2012.
• "Around the masters of the Janów Group" – paintings by self-taught artists from Janów and Nikiszowiec, including Ewald Gawlik and Erwin Sówka.
• Temporary exhibitions – from embroidery in Silesian homes to photographs of the mine's underground world.

Interesting facts

A typical Nikiszowiec flat had two rooms and a kitchen, about 63 m², and the estate had roughly a thousand flats in total. Since 2 October 2023, two figures of beboks – mischievous creatures from Silesian folk tales – have stood at the entrance: Sztefa and Erwinek, commemorating Stefania Blaut and the painter Erwin Sówka. The estate itself has been a Monument of History, one of Poland's top heritage designations, since 2011; it is on the Silesian Industrial Monuments Route and, since 2018, on the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH).

Tripto tip

Allow about an hour for the exhibitions and another 1–2 hours for a walk around the estate. Start at the museum, then explore the red-brick blocks, Plac Wyzwolenia and the neo-Baroque St Anne's Church, also designed by the Zillmanns. Check current opening hours and prices on the Katowice History Museum website before you go. Kazimierz Kutz's films "The Salt of the Black Earth" and "The Pearl in the Crown" are a good introduction to the world of the local miners.