The meeting point for all conference tours is located in the front of the Entrance to the Faculty of Social Sciences - University of Silesia (conference venue), Bankowa 11 street.
DEAR TOUR'S PARTICIPANTS PLEASE BE READY AND WAIT FOR THE GUIDE IN THE FRONT OF THE BUILDING/BANKOWA 11 STREET at 12.15 pm, 22 July (Monday).
The Queen Louise Adit complex is a set of tourist's facilities including the preserved part of the Queen Louise Mine and the Zabrze-located section of the Main Key Hereditary Adit – the largest hydro-technical structure in Europe. Currently, in the area of the mine and adit, concentrated around two shafts: the "Carnall" shaft at Wolności Street
and the "Wilhelmina" shaft at Sienkiewicz Street, there is a complex of underground routes, unique in Europe, presenting the development of mining technology and the history of Upper Silesian mining industry, accompanied by exhibitions and attractions on the surface. In genuine spaces you can feel the spirit of over two hundred years of history and experience an unforgettable adventure.
The Queen Louise Adit Complex is the biggest tourist complex which presents Polish mining heritage. It consists of the revitalized ground infrastructure and authentic underground workings. The visitors can choose between several underground tourist routes, prepared for different age groups (we invite children as young as 3 years old.), presenting different thematic ranges (among others water route). The visitors can become acquainted with the 200 years old methods of the coal extraction, see the underground water port with the wooden mobile cran, unique corridor forged in a whole in coal seam and see contemporary mining machines still in use.
The visitors can take a boat tour in unique, more than 1 km long, fragment of the adit under the center of Zabrze.
The Queen Louise Adit complex consists of 3 locations: Carnall Shaft Zone (Wolności St.) with Chain Bath building, bistro and 2 permament exhibitations, the Wilhelmina Shaft Zone (Sienkiewicza St.) with educational Park 12C, Military Technology Park and the reconstructed adit outlet (Miarki St.). Tourist service points with ticket offices can be found in each of the locations.
Please be on time
Located in the Katowice Culture Zone, Muzeum Śląskie is a showcase of the city and the entire region. The institution draws inspiration from the heritage of the region,
its intellectual and artistic achievements, and the rich tradition of multiculturalism associated with, among others, the utmost importance of the industry in Silesia.
Originally established in 1929, in 2015 Muzeum Śląskie gained
a new seat, exceptional due to its architecture and location. The former coal mine has been transformed into a unique “culture mine”, an example of bold contemporary architecture, in 2015 classified as one of the top ten buildings in Europe and was shortlisted in Mies van der Rohe Competition.
In the very centre of the capital of Upper Silesia, at the depth of 14 metres, one can admire the comprehensive and diverse collections of old and contemporary Polish art.
In addition, the Museum provides with a possibility of visiting the Gallery of Silesian Religious Art, the only Gallery of Non-professional Art in Poland, “The Light of History.
Upper Silesia Over the Ages” exhibition that arouses great emotions and interest, a nationally unique collection of theatre and film scenography, as well as the modern educational space “In Search of Tomek”.
For the visitors, a unique interactive exhibition was prepared on 600 m2 of space. It allows you to not only watch old computers but also sit in front of the screen and try your hand in practice. The MHKI exhibitions are very popular. E.g. in a special Museums Night 2018, between 5:00 PM and 1:00 AM museum was visited by over 2,000 people.
Thanks to the constant collection, the Museum has already collected about 4,000 exhibits from the late 1950s to the early 21st century. The collections contains, for example computers: IBM S39, ODRA 1304, ODRA 1305, VAX, unique PRS4, Apple IIc, the first portable HP 85, IBM seria51xx portable or the Soviet ZX Spectrum called Radug and
and many others. The collection also has many Polish production equipment including for example, MERITUM, ComPan, Bosman, Impol, Meraster and many ELWRO equipment. In addition to hardware monuments, the museum also collects professional magazines, literature and software. They are planned to be made available in the emerging Specialist Library.
Departure to Tyskie Brewery 17.30/Tuesday 23 July, immediately after the session. Please be on time
Duke’s Brewery in Tychy is brewing beer uninterruptedly for four centuries. The earliest mention of the brewery is in the urnary from 1613. However, the date of its establishment is dated 1629, when it was first described this brewery belonging to the Promnice family. Silesian architecture pearl, and at the same time a modern brewery.
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, the period of the „Tyskie Browary” prince flourished. It was the time when Prince John Henry XI Hochberg, the true visionary and then owner of the brewery, developed it, introducing innovative solutions for those times. „Tyskie Browary Książęce” remains one of the most modern breweries in Europe today.
In 1866, Prince Jan Henry employed Julius Müller, the brewmaster of the Masters, who used the lower fermentation yeast in the brewing process at „Tyskie Browar Książęcy”.
So was the beer that everyone wanted to try from now on. At the end of the 19th century, Tyskie Brewery was one of the largest in Europe, and brewed beer called “Tychy Gold” reached Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig. In the interwar period, small quantities of beer even reached South America. From the time Müller had struck the first batch of classic lager, the brewery was experiencing a real boom. Introduced here: brewery electrical lighting, malt and ice making machines, elevator for transporting barrels from a deckchair, first railway line and railway station for Tychow and automatic bottle shop. Tyskie beer always tastes perfect, and closed fermentation technology (1960s) has been introduced to provide complete control over the highest quality beer. At the time, other breweries in Poland used only open fermenters.
https://zwiedzbrowar.pl/en/
5.FAMET, Opole
FAMET S.A. is a Polish, modern company operating on the heavy industry market. Its main products are steel, welded and machined components for construction, handling and electric machines, including for wind and hydro power industry, like machine frames, lifting booms, stator and rotor bodies for electric generators and motors, or supporting frames and braking disks for wind turbines. The company also specializes in the design, manufacture and supply of process equipment for key chemical, petrochemical and thermal power industries in Poland and abroad, for example heat exchangers, chemical reaction columns, complete gas filtration and cooling stations, high and low pressure feed water heaters and steam condensers for power plants, etc. The company's headquarters is located in Kędzierzyn-Koźle, in south-western Poland.
FAMET has five production works in Poland, three in the south-west and two in the south-east of the country. They differ in size but are all provided with modern machines and equipment for production, including for very precise machining, and they complement each other. The plant at Opole is the largest one and outfitted with the heaviest production equipment. The total area of its production halls reaches 60.000 sqm. It enables to manufacture very large size products of a weight of up to 500 tons. Since such large and heavy loads are difficult, and in many cases even impossible to transport by road, the plant has its own river haven with a gantry crane of 500 ton lifting capacity.
The Odra River, at which the haven is located, connects the plant with Polish sea harbours at Szczecin and Świnoujście on the Baltic Sea as well as with the network of rivers and canals of Western Europe. For more, interesting information, please see our website
6.AIUT, Gliwice
AIUT Sp. zo.o. is a family company based totally on the Polish capital. For over 25 years, we have created many solutions for the demanding business needs of customers in Poland and abroad. We have already implemented over 1300 projects in 45 countries. Our systems work in the automotive, cement-lime, power and fuel industries, as well as in the metallurgy, metalworking, furniture, food and paper industries. Our main objective is to improve our efficiency and the quality of manufacturing. With this goal in mind, we create new technologies as well as modernize existing production lines. To implement our solutions we apply the ideas of IoT, 4.0 Industry and Artificial Intelligence.
We have a highly qualified staff of more than 400 engineers in automation, electronics, electrical, IT, mechanics and robotics. Commitment, consistent action and belief in continuous development, make our company one of the best in the industry. Our headquarter is located in the Katowice Special Economic Zone in Gliwice. We have also five branches in Poland (Białystok, Bielsko-Biała, Bydgoszcz, Opole and Poznań) and five subsidiaries abroad: Mumbai (India), Dingolfing (Germany), Greenville (USA), Sebes (Romania) and Shenyang (China).
7.Katowice city tour
When in 1865 the Prussian king allowed to organize the village of Katowice according to the Prussian ordination for cities, it was the result of the turbulent development of the settlement in previous years. It happened because the owner of Katowice made great efforts to have the Upper Silesian Railway set a place near the goods for the railway station, opened in 1847. Therefore, we will start a tour of the history of Katowice under the old railway station at ul. Dworcowa, where we will tell the first story about people and that they owe their development to love.
The theme of the walk will also be people from many parts of the world who were born in Katowice, lived or just visited them. We will meet a Scottish steelworker, a Greek musician, a Ukrainian metallurgist, Czechs fleeing to Poland from Germany, an English prince, a German pharmacist who was one of the first in the world selling Nivea cream,
a Lithuanian noble from the Italian family, a pioneer of Russian and Polish aviation, a Jewish lawyer who became one of the three highest-valued fighters in the USA for the rights of a black, French general who, some time after his stay in Katowice, became the president of Hungary, whose son became the first prime minister of free Hungary.
We will also visit places where events took place that had a wide impact and had an impact on the history of the world.
Within 2 hours we will go about four kilometers and we will show Katowice from 1866-1924, in their original borders. We will also show newer buildings.
8.Muzeum Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków
(Departure at 9:00 am, return at 5:00 pm.)
Jagiellonian University Museum – Collegium Maius
he Jagiellonian University Museum is located in the university’s oldest building – Collegium Maius, bought for the University in 1399. The Jagiellonian University was founded in 1364 by king Casimir III the Great.
Until the late 18th century lecture rooms, professor's apartments, a library and a common room for professors were located in Collegium Maius. In the period 19th – mid XX century the building was used as a university library, which was transferred to the new building not early as in 1940. Nowadays the most important objects for the history of the Jagiellonian University are presented in Collegium Maius.
The collections of the Museum are located in several halls. About the history of the Jagiellonian University one can get to know by visiting the old library room, professors’ common room (Stuba Communis), the treasury, the Copernicus Room and the old auditorium decorated by portraits of professors and Polish kings.
In separate rooms of the building of Collegium Maius, the Museum presents the most valuable in Poland collection of scientific instruments, numbering over 2,000 objects. Between the objects one can mention some of unique kind, like the set of fifteenth-century astronomical instruments from the time of Nicolaus Copernicus, the collection of globes, including the 16th century mechanical armillary sphere with globe on which the continent of America was marked. The historical cryogenic equipment of laboratories of Karol Olszewski and Zygmunt Wróblewski is also unique object, including gas liquefiers from late 19th century, gasometers, pumps and apparatus, in which Olszewski and Wróblewski liquefied oxygen for the first time in 1883. The museum also presents a large collection of physical, chemical and surveying instruments, mostly from the18th to 20th century.
https://maius.uj.edu.pl/en_GB/
9. Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau
(Departure at 12:00 pm, return at 8:00 pm.)
Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau former german nazi concentration and extermination camp
The authentic Memorial consists of two parts of the former camp: Auschwitz and Birkenau. A visit with an educator allows better understanding of this place.
The post-camp relics are protected by the Museum created in 1947. The Memorial today is i.a. the Archive and Collections as well as research, conservation and publishing center.
All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. It was established by Germans in 1940, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. Its name was changed to Auschwitz, which also became the name of Konzentrationslager Auschwitz. The direct reason for the establishment of the camp was the fact that mass arrests of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing "local" prisons. The first transport of Poles reached KL Auschwitz from Tarnów prison on June 14, 1940. Initially, Auschwitz was to be one more concentration camp of the type that the Nazis had been setting up since the early 1930s. It functioned in this role throughout its existence, even when, beginning in 1942, it also became the largest of the death camps. In addition to Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and Soviet POWs, about 25 thousand prisoners of other nationalities were imprisoned in Auschwitz. Research on the story of these other nationality groups is still in progress, and the statistics about them should therefore be treated as fragmentary, conservative estimates based on a limited number of cases.
The first and oldest was the so-called "main camp," later also known as "Auschwitz I" (the number of prisoners fluctuated around 15,000, sometimes rising above 20,000), which was established on the grounds and in the buildings of prewar Polish barracks. The second part was the Birkenau camp (which held over 90,000 prisoners in 1944), also known as "Auschwitz II" This was the largest part of the Auschwitz complex. The Nazis began building it in 1941 on the site of the village of Brzezinka, three kilometers from Oswiecim. The Polish civilian population was evicted and their houses confiscated and demolished. The greater part of the apparatus of mass extermination was built in Birkenau and the majority of the victims were murdered here;
More than 40 sub-camps, exploiting the prisoners as slave laborers, were founded, mainly at various sorts of German industrial plants and farms, between 1942 and 1944.
The largest of them was called Buna (Monowitz, with ten thousand prisoners) and was opened by the camp administration in 1942 on the grounds of the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber and fuel plant six kilometers from the Auschwitz camp. On November 1943, the Buna sub-camp became the seat of the commandant of the third part of the camp, Auschwitz III, to which some other Auschwitz sub-camps were subordinated.
In April 1946, the Ministry of Culture and Art (Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki – MKiS) sent a group of former prisoners, led by Tadeusz Wąsowicz, to Oświęcim to protect the site of the Auschwitz camp and set up a museum there.At the beginning of 1947, Ludwik Rajewski, the head of the Department of Museums and Monuments in the MKiS, presented an organizational plan according to which the Museum would be a “historical document.”. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was created by an act of the Polish parliament on July 2, 1947, and includes the grounds of two extant parts of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camps. The Museum grounds cover 191 hectares, of which 20 are at Auschwitz I and 171 at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. On the museum grounds stand several hundred camp buildings and ruins, including the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria, over a dozen kilometers of camp fence, camp roads, and the railroad spur ("ramp") at Birkenau. In 1979, the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was entered on the UNESCO international list of world heritage sites. As early as 1947, the first exhibition, expanded in 1950, was opened in several camp blocks at the Auschwitz I concentration camp site. It presented the history of extermination and the conditions in which the prisoners lived. A new exhibition was opened in 1955. With some changes, it is still in use today. After 1960, some of the camp blocks contained the so-called "national exhibitions," created at the initiative of former prisoners from various countries who are associated in the International Auschwitz Committee. They primarily portray the fate of the citizens of those countries who were deported by the Nazis in transports to Auschwitz concentration camp.
10. Gliwice Museum - Gliwice Radio Station [Only for Summer School students/session in Gliwice on 21.07.2019/Sunday afternoon]
Gliwice Radio Station, which since 2017 is the Historic Monument, is characterized by a unique wooden broadcasting tower and an originally preserved complex of buildings. However, it went down in history primarily as a silent witness to the famous German provocation of 1939. The first radio station in Gliwice was established in 1925 and was located in the present 2 Radiowa Street. The radio station with a characteristic wooden tower, which is located at 129 Tarnogórska Street, was established in 1935.
The decision to build the new facility was caused by the necessity to increase transmission capacity in Upper Silesia, which after the division in 1922 was a field of fierce competition between Germany and Poland. In the building of the old Radio Station, a recording studio was left, while in the new one there were placed transmission devices. The radio equipment that can be seen in the main building of the transmitter has been produced by companies: Lorenz, Siemens & Halske and Telefunken. Although 80 years have passed, some of the equipment is still running and can still be started up. However, all these devices would have been useless had it not been for the wooden transmission tower. Thanks to it, broadcasts from Gliwice's Radio Stations were heard in Europe. In turn at nights, under favorable weather conditions, even in Asia and New Zealand. The historic transmitting tower is still used for communication purposes - there are several different antennas and transmitters of mobile networks, local radio stations or emergency services. Worldwide, the Gliwice Radio Station became famous on August 31, 1939. On that day, a group of German attackers under the command of SS officer Alfred Naujocks, pretending to be a group of Silesian insurgents, attacked the Radio Station building in order to broadcast a propaganda proclamation. Although on air we probably managed to broadcast only nine words of the proclamation in Polish - Attention, here Gliwice! The Radio Station is in polish hands ... - and the whole action ended in failure, the provocation was used by the Germans, presenting Poland as an aggressor guilty of starting the IIWW. In order to give a greater impression of the probability of Poles attacking the radio station, a Silesian, Franciszek Honiok, who had been arrested earlier, was shot on the spot. Gliwice Radio Station remains therefore a unique place where history intertwines with technology and everyone will find something for themselves.
http://muzeum.gliwice.pl/en/explore/radiostacja-gliwice-1
11. Zinc Rolling Museum Katowice-Szopienice [Only for Summer School students, 19.07.2019/Friday]
Walcownia Cynku (Zinc Rolling Mill) in Katowice – Szopienice is a indicator that is inscribed in the industrial heritage of the region, which significantly influenced the development of the Silesia voivodship. It is one of the landmarks in the history of the mighty steel industry, providing employment and livelihood for many generations – residents of Katowice, till not so long ago.
Walcownia Cynku (Zinc Rolling Mill) was built in 1904 near Huta Bernhard (Bernhard Steelworks) and the railway line Szopienice-Siemianowice. This location was beneficial because the supply of raw materials and export of zinc sheet metal via the railway. The main hall that was built in Walcownia Cynku (Zinc Rolling Mill) was 91 meters long and 20 meters wide, and the engine room had a length of 70 meters and a width of 6 meters. The height of the hall was 5.124 meters. In 2002, after almost 110 years, production at Walcownia Cynku (Zinc Rolling Mill) came to an end. You can feel the atmosphere of work and previous production.
Historic building was taken over by the Foundation for the Protection of Silesian Industrial Heritage and was transformed into Zinc Metallurgy Museum – The Rolling Mill. The preservation of technical cultural heritage in the area of Silesia and didactic as well as researching activities are the Museum’s primary aims. It is achieved by protecting an owned collection, performing professional evaluations, completing records, and maintaining historical industrial buildings.
The Museum’s main goal is also supported by organisations of culture, as well as educational nature. It encourages popularizing the idea of protecting technical heritage
Devices that assured proper flow of metal sheet production technology are located in the mill’s main hall. The technological line consists of: two melting furnaces with a capacity of 50 tonnes, heating furnace for boards, carousel casting with 24 water-cooled forms, a roughing mill, 3 finishing mills, 2 pairs of preliminary shears for cutting sheet metal, 2 pairs of finishing shears for metal sheet. The set of rolling mills was powered by steam engines.
The building is under preservation maintenance, including the rolling mills and steam engines. Walcownia is museum, where the previous technology and technique as well as the memory of people’s hard labour will be maintained.
https://www.walcownia.org/
