Soap and water are the best whitener

About the exhibition

Upper Silesian workers’ estates are an important point on the regional tourist route. They are characterised by an orderly spatial structure and – especially so – by a developed infrastructure of public utility facilities.

The employers had to take special care to prevent workers from frequent job changes. The designers of estates well-known today, located in Katowice, Zabrze, Ruda Śląska and many other cities, planned many amenities for the workers and their families, in addition to the dwellings. Therefore, in the vicinity of the residential buildings, there were also shops, schools and nurseries, churches, restaurants and health care centres. The inhabitants of the company estates could do most of their daily errands within the estate, without the need to travel.

In today’s Rymarska Street in Nikiszowiec, there was a laundry used by all the inhabitants. At the ground floor of this high building with large windows, there were masonry troughs with taps. Here, women brought baskets with dirty clothes and bedsheets. In special cauldrons, they washed and boiled the sheets in hot water flowing from the coal mine heating unit. They hung the wet items for drying in the attics of their houses or in the drying room available on the upper floor of the laundry. Electric mangling machines were also available at the laundry building. After a busy day spent laundering and mangling, women returned home with baskets of clean sheets. When modern washing machines came into use, younger women less and less frequently came to the public laundry, while the older ones became too weak to wash by hand. Still, the facilities were used until the end of 1980s. 

At the exhibition, the work cycle the women had to perform is presented, starting from bringing in a heavy basket to the laundry, to doing laundry with a washboard, to drying, mangling and, finally, to arranging meticulously the freshly scented, evened fabrics, wrapped in a special linen sheet called maglownik, in a wicker basket.

We would like to invite all the Nikiszowiec dwellers and tourists to see the exhibition!

Bożena Donnerstag

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