Museums

Museum in Nikiszowiec

In the historic district of Nikiszowiec, built in 1908–1919 for the miners of the "Giesche" colliery to a design by the Berlin architects Emil and Georg Zillmann, at 4 Rymarska Street operates the Museum in Nikiszowiec — the Urban Ethnography Department of the Museum of Katowice History. Its seat is the former laundry and mangle house, for decades part of the everyday life of the workers' estate.

The laundry and the mangle

Everyone in the estate once used the laundry, because the flats had no bathrooms. Great troughs with taps stood here, with hot water flowing from the mine's power plant, linen was boiled in boilers called kastroły, and the electric mangle for pressing worked until the 1980s. The permanent exhibition "Water and Soap Are the Best Whitener. In the Laundry and Mangle of Nikiszowiec", opened in February 2013, received the museum award Sybilla 2013.

U nos w doma and the Janów Group

The exhibition "U nos w doma na Nikiszu" (nominated for the Sybilla 2012 award) reconstructs a three-room workers' flat: a kitchen with a stove and a byfyj (food cupboard), a parlour with a small altar and a bedroom with a dressing table with a triptych mirror. The third exhibition — "Around the Masters of the Janów Group" — presents works by the naive painters of Nikiszowiec, including Teofil Ociepka, Ewald Gawlik and Erwin Sówka. The institution's history goes back to the Magiel Gallery of 1996, and since 2023 sculpted beboks — Silesian hobgoblins — named Sztef and Erwinek "live" by the entrance.

Practicalities

Address: 4 Rymarska Street, Katowice. Current hours and prices: mhk.katowice.pl. The estate — a Historic Monument since 2011 — lies on the Industrial Monuments Trail, not far from the Silesian Museum.