Lodz – City of Four Cultures - PRIVATE tour from Warsaw (8h)

Piotrkowska Street - equally popular is Piotrkowska Street – Poland’s longest promenade, lined with boutiques, clubs, pubs and statues of famous Polish artists; the most spectacular of which portrays Artur Rubinstein playing the piano. This is an obligatory photo opportunity you won’t be able to resist! Vibrant by day and buzzing at night, no matter what time of year you visit, Piotrkowska Street is the chosen venue for dozens of events, which include: the Hokus Pokus Festival of Street Art and Magic; the Light Move Festival; the Songwriter Festival and the Łódź of Four Cultures Festival, to name just a few. Keep your eye out for Łódź’s very own walk of fame, known here as the Avenue of Stars. 

The traditional sights are definitely worth visiting but be sure to check out the city’s alternative scene as well, Łódź is actually known as something of a Mecca for hipsters! Places to head to include Off Piotrkowska and Piotrkowska 217.  If you’re partial to a good monument, Łódź doesn’t disappoint: check out the Citizens at the Turn of the Millennium, Citizens of the New Millennium and Identity monuments.  

Manufaktura is a favourite spot for both locals and visitors. This showstopping red-brick, multi-storey shopping mall and leisure centre has been brought to life thanks to an epic renovation project of former industrial textile factories. In addition to several bars, restaurants and cafes, the complex includes a theatre and cinema, the ms2 Art Museum and the Factory Museum, which recounts the long and interesting history of the site. The enviable list of attractions also includes a climbing wall, bowling alley, an urban beach with deckchairs and a zip line offering a bird’s-eye view of Manufaktura for braver visitors. You also get a really great view from the glass-enclosed swimming pool in the loft-style Andel’s hotel. This isn’t for the faint-hearted though; the pool is found on the rooftop of the hotel, 25 metres above ground, where a cast-iron firefighting water tank once stood, in the former spinning mill of Poznański’s factory.  

There can be no talk of Łódź without mentioning the movie industry, of course. Graduates of the renowned Łódź Film School include Roman Polański, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The staircase where the future artists used to once sit now features plaques with their names. 

The city’s backstreets have themselves been used as locations for over 200 films, both national and international, and the city plays proud host to the prestigious Drama School Festival. 

The Se-Ma-For studio, which has won two Academy Awards and specialises in animated cartoons for children, (e.g Peter and the Wolf), is where Tomek Bagiński’s Cathedral was made, as well as his Animated History of Poland, which promoted the country at the World Expo. Łódź’s film tradition is presented at the Film Museum (which is currently closed under renovation until the end of 2020). There is also a special film trail dedicated to avid fans. 

Łódź and street art go hand in hand. So much so in fact, that the Łódź Tourism Organisation has produced a map dedicated specially to finding pieces of street art. It includes more than 150 murals, sculptures and art installations made from metal bars, car parts, pieces of mirror and even moss, all dotted around the city. The map is a great guide, enabling visitors to admire many large-sized works of art featured on the walls of buildings, by street artists from both Poland (Proembrion, M-City, Etam) and abroad (Osgemeos, Eduardo Kobra, Inti, Aryz, Remed). These myriad murals have been created over the years, for example during the Urban Forms Gallery Festival and, before that, the International Graffiti Festival. Save enough camera battery for the biggest wow factor of all: the first 3D mural in Poland and one of just three in the world by Italian artist Awer, found on the wall of the building at 93 Pomorska St in all of its multicolour glory.  

Factory-residential complex on the River Jasień was built in the 19th century by Karol Scheibler, the richest industrialist of Lodz. It was a self-sufficient city inside a city modeled on English industrial settlements. It had factory buildings, including a huge castle-like cotton mill, warehouses, workers’ houses, school, fire station, two hospitals, gasworks, factory club, shops, houses of the owners, and a railway siding. All that was placed along straight cobbled streets and it was architecturally coherent.

Urban complex “Księży Młyn” (in English Pastor’s Mill) is the biggest historic factory complex in Lodz from the second half of the 19th century, built in the location of an old milling settlement that belonged to the local pastor, which is where the name originated from. It was created by Karol Wilhelm Scheibler, an entrepreneur from western Rhineland, who arrived in the Kingdom of Poland in 1848 and after a few years settled down in Lodz. The complex includes factory buildings, residential buildings, houses of the owners, directors’ mansions, school, hospitals, fire station, gasworks, factory club, and gardens and parks. Scheibler began to build his cotton empire from the factory complex at the Water Square (today Victory Square). His consequent investments already included the area of Księży Młyn, where the largest multidivisional factory complex of cotton textiles together with the workers’ settlement and the house of the plant’s director was erected. Experience gained while working for western European companies and openness to technical advances made Scheibler a leading factory owner in Lodz, and he became a model for numerous entrepreneurs of that time.

In a narrow sense, Księży Młyn is the name of a settlement, huge cotton mill and workers’ houses with a street, located on the western side of Przędzalniana Street, between Tymienieckiego and Fabryczna streets and Źródliska Park I. In a broader sense, it includes the entire urban complex which had formed up to the 1920’s, including the Scheibler and Grohman families’ estates. In 1971 the urban complex was recognized as an industrial architecture monument.

The fall of the textile industry in Lodz forced the change of the settlement’s function. Today Księży Młyn is a magnet for tourists, artists, and photographers. The remarkable post-factory interiors are venue for interesting cultural events, festivals, fashion shows, while the former mansions have been converted into museums.

Prepare yourself before you visit Radegast Station. It’s a site of great historical importance but is emotionally harrowing nonetheless. A broken column whose shape evokes a crematorium chimney is the entrance into the Tunnel of Memory, a sombre site filled with photos of Holocaust victims. This is the most shocking and heart-breaking part of Radegast Station, through which some 145,000 people, mainly Jews, passed on their way to concentration camps and their met their inevitable fate. The wooden station building, with a row of matzevahs (tombstones) in the background, houses a model of Litzmannstadt Getto – the Łódź Ghetto. Of the more than 200,000 Jews imprisoned there, sadly very few survived. They are commemorated in the Survivors’ Park with the Monument to Poles Who Saved Jews and more than 600 “trees of memory” planted by survivors. Other remembrance sites include the Jewish Cemetery (Poland’s largest), the Children’s Martyrdom Monument and the Romani Forge, situated on the site where the Germans set up a camp for Roma and Sinti people.