POLAND: Working class apartments are becoming tourist attractions in post-communist Poland

Record ID: 644169

  • Title: POLAND: Working class apartments are becoming tourist attractions in post-communist Poland
  • Date: 7th February 2007
  • Summary: (CEEF) NOWA HUTA, POLAND (RECENT) (REUTERS) STREETS AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS PEOPLE WALKING ON PAVEMENT TRAM APPROACHING STOP
  • Embargoed: 22nd February 2007 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Poland
  • Country: Poland
  • Topics: Travel / Tourism
  • Reuters ID: LVA8JVF458BSR0Y3C1GXXDUSRFDE
  • Story Text: In a purpose built communist city near Krakow, a small tour guide company offers tourists the chance to experience at first hand the communist way of life. Tourists are driven around in an East German Trabant car, stopping off at a 1970' apartment for a shot of vodka with one of the locals.
    Nowa Huta, directly translated as New Foundry, is a working class city near Kracow.
    The city was purpose built in the 1950's as a communist settlement for thousands of metal workers who arrived from all over Poland.
    For many Poles the place is damned due to its dark communist past, but in contrast it attracts tourists seeking an insight into what a classic communist society was like.
    The founder of a communist tour company, Michal Ostrowski, wanted to create a tourist experience not offered by the Polish tourist office's more traditional programme.
    Ostrowski came up with the idea of opening his company named 'Crazy Guides' in order to unlock an area of the market unparalleled by any other tour guides.
    The tourists are given a very personal tour in a typical communist Trabant car, a small unusual looking car mass-produced in East Germany during the 1970's
    As well as driving visitors around the concrete jungle of Nowa Huta, the tour includes an insight into how the town's labourers lived by inviting them into a former metal worker's apartment.
    The owner of the apartment, Stanislaw Cempa, used to work in the city's metal foundries. He welcomes tourists into his home which has remained the same since the 1970's.
    "The tourists are most surprised when I tell them about communism in the old days. About when the Polish nation resisted pressure from communist authorities and censorship for such a long time. Watching them I could feel that they were astonished and wondering why nobody ended it earlier," Cempa said during a typical tour.
    Tourists encounter ways of life those from the West have little experience of; coupons giving the public permission to buy anything from shoes to a kettle, food bought directly from the fields and traditional Polish cuisine.
    "I totally didn't expect it, I didn't know much about it before I came. But we wanted to do something a little bit different you know, the old town (Krakow) is all very well and good, but this is a real experiment. This is quite, it feels a bit more Eastern European you know, a bit more Communist era, a bit more modern history and that is kind of why we wanted to go off the beaten track just a little bit," British student Tom Vanghan said after his tour around Nowa Huta's communist attractions.
    After the tour it seemed visiting Cempa's communist style apartment, eating gherkins and doing vodka toasts in Polish impressed Vanghan and his friend Hannah Stapley the most.
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