…And it started a long time ago, here in Janów, the place where there was a border of three emperors who divided Poland like a cream cake. And there was nothing, not a bit they left on the map. But the empires collapsed, and as the master used to say, the empires flourish like flowers, and then wither with their provinces coming off…
Angelus
And it began when Anton Uthemann (in years 1905-1913, a general manager of the mining company Georg von Giesche’s Erben) decided to build a model mining estate. A construction of the first estate, called Gieschewald (Giszowiec), began in 1907 and a year later the company turned to the authorities for a permit to build another one, near the Carmer and Nickisch shafts. Name of the second estate derives from the second shaft – Nickischschacht, Nikisz in Silesian, Nikiszowiec in Polish.
The design of the estate for 7,000 inhabitants was commissioned two eminent German architects, Emil and Georg Zillmann brothers, the same who previously designed Gieschewald. People started to move into new apartment houses since 1911. The construction was finished in 1919.
Nikisz was meant to be a unique place, to satisfy all workers’ needs including aesthetic ones. It was built of red bric
And what is behind this beautiful facade of these three-storey, almost hundred-year-old buildings? Inside, three-room apartments of the surface up to 70 square metres! Each family had an attic and a basement at its disposal and in every yard there were so-called ‘piekarnioki’, i.e. bakery furnaces.
I do not know what that means, but sounds nice. 
))
