Our users from Bytom, Poland have been very active recently and have uploaded plenty of old Bytom pictures. First of all, Bytom is a city of almost 200 000 citizens, located in the Upper Silesia region of Poland. It was set up in the 13th century, or even earlier, so it has a pretty long history; however it is most widely known for coal mining which was the main line of industry in the whole Upper Silesia region since multiple major coal mines and steel mills were built there starting from the 18th century. Nowadays the character of Bytom  has changed, most coal mines and steel mills are closed and the city concentrates on trade as its main area of activity.

We had difficulty choosing a picture for today’s blog entry because there were so many interesting photos of:

• Bytom architecture, like this one or this one.
• places in Bytom: see here or here
• people in Bytom, for example here or here
  
• Bytom industry: have a look here

In the end we decided to go for this picture of old cooling towers in the Szombierki cogeneration plant, uploaded by user ameba1, because we found it particularly amusing:

Cooling towers in Szombierki power plant

If you aren’t sure what a cogeneration plant is - following Wikipedia,  a conventional power plant creates heat as a by-product of electricity generation; a cogeneration plant captures this heat and distributes it as as hot water for district heating. So the Szombierki plant was actually a conventional power plant at the beginning; it used these cooling towers for emitting the heat generated with electricity.

What is very interesting in these towers is that thy were based on a wooden construction; this could not have been accidental because the Szombierki plant was built shortly after World War I by German architects Georg i Emil Zillmann, who were world-wide famous architects (at that time Bytom was a part of Germany). If you visit Bytom today, you will not see these towers anymore, however cooling towers are still common around the world and nowadays can look like these:

Modern cooling towers

Related links:

Wikipedia article on Bytom

Web discounts for hotels in Bytom area

Technorati Tags: engineering, history, industry, photos

Kadzielnia - Kielce, Poland

User www.kielce.vel.pl has posted this picture of the Kadzielnia hill in Kielce, Poland. Kielce is a city of about 200,000 citizens with history dating back to the origins of Poland in the 10th century. For the last 500 years, Kielce was an important industrial city due to its richness in natural resources. The picture above is a good example of that - since the 18th century until the 1960s, natural lime resources in the Kadzielnia hill were extracted in an open-pit mine. Afterwards the area was turned into a nature reserve with an emerald-coloured lake and an amphitheatre for 5000 spectators, drilled in the hill’s stone.

Related links:

Wikipedia article on Kielce

Web discounts for Kielce hotels

Technorati Tags: history, industry, photos, travel