Katowice is a blue-collar city, growing up during the industrial revolution, with its people being put to work in sooty mine shafts, factories and railway yards. The area’s history is inextricably entwined with the manufacture of coal and steel and the stacks, shafts, slag heaps and massive waves of migrants that followed the discovery of the region’s mineral resources.
Derelict factories and foundries, blackened chimneys and abandoned maintenance yards of Silesia’s industrial boom represent the bulk of Silesia’s tourist offerings today. Grey, bleak for the most part…..Freedom Square’s small oval of greenish pleasantry stands out in the urban tangle and was the city’s main axis point in the first city plan of 1860. There used to be “Tomb of the Unknown Insurgent” in 1923, unveiled by one of the heroes of the Silesian Uprisings, Wojciech Korfanty (see below for info on him). However during Soviet rule, that memorial was replaced with a monument of 2 thuggish tommy-wielding Red Army soldiers standing atop a truly hideous concrete pedestal – they were removed in 2014 after years of protests. Some city functionary wasn’t specific enough in their instruction…because while the thugs have gone, the hideous pedestal remains…… 🙂
I went looking for and found some treasures but they were difficult to find. 
Tatiana’s restaurant – delicious sour rye soup (zurek) and wabbit for lunch! 
Always love a good statue, especially when they are of figures that have created change i their time….and these 2 couldn’t be different from each other… Józef Klemens Piłsudski was Chief of State (1918–22), “First Marshal of Poland ” (from 1920), and defacto leader (1926–35) of the Second Polish Republic. 
From mid-World War I he had a major influence in Poland’s politics and was an important figure on the European political scene. He was the person most responsible for the creation of the Second Polish Republic in 1918, 123 years after it had been taken over by Russia, Austria and Prussia.
A Polish national activist, journalist and politician, Wojciech Korfanty (April 20, 1873 – August 17, 1939) achieved infamy as a paramilitary leader during the Silesian Uprisings. Born the son of a Polish Silesian miner, in his early life Korfanty studied philosophy, law and economics at the University of Breslau (Wroclaw) becoming involved in Polish nationalist circles as a young man and joining the secret nationalist society “Z,” which resisted the Germanisation of Upper Silesia’s Polish population in the decades prior to World War I. After World War I, Korfanty was one of the chief advocates of joining Upper Silesia and other eastern German territories to the new post-war Polish Republic. 
As diplomacy failed, ‘Uprisings’ were successful in forcing the German authorities to leave Upper Silesia. Korfanty was largely credited by Poles for his role in the outcome when Silesia’s most valuable industrial districts were granted to Poland after the war.
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