Historic sites
modernist hotel with a dome on the corner, built over an adit on a concrete slab
Historic sites
brick manor house with a three-storey tower in Rokitnica, with surviving wall paintings
Historic sites
steel bridge from 1910-1913 from which sand backfill was tipped into the shaft
Historic sites
an overgrown mound of a 13th-15th-century stronghold, under which traces of a workshop thousands of years old were found
Historic sites
a medieval motte mound above a former moat, on the "Gajdzikowe Górki" trail
Historic sites
the oldest surviving building in Zabrze, a brick palace with a mansard roof and a façade with a projecting bay
Historic sites in Zabrze: the oldest building in the city in Mikulczyce, two medieval mottes, the modernist Admiralspalast and a tipping bridge.
Zabrze is known for industry, but its monuments reach far back beyond the age of coal. The six sites here include medieval mounds, a sixteenth-century palace, a manor house of the 1800s and twentieth-century architecture.
The oldest surviving building in the city is said to be the Palace in Mikulczyce on Lipowa street. Its beginnings probably go back to the sixteenth century, and a date of 1661 was found on a ceiling beam. The brick palace is built on a rectangular plan under a hipped mansard roof with dormers, and with its park and forge it forms a palace complex.
Older still are two conical mottes of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The motte in Mikulczyce is now a heavily overgrown mound about thirty-seven metres across, with a moat on its eastern side, investigated by archaeologists in 1970-1972. The motte in Rokitnica is smaller, about twenty-five metres across, beside a small pond that was once its moat. It is a stop on the “Gajdzikowe Górki” nature trail. Both have the shape of a truncated cone and are all that remains of timber-and-earth defensive structures.
The manor house in Rokitnica at Żniwiarzy 2 is a brick building put up after 1850 with a three-storey tower, entered in the register of monuments in 2016. Its wall paintings are fairly well preserved, but the structure is in poor condition, so it is best admired from outside.
The Admiralspalast Hotel at Wolności 305 was designed by the Berlin architects Richard Bielenberg and Josef Moser. This modernist building of the 1920s has a rounded corner crowned with a dome about eleven metres across. It stands above the Main Kluczowa Hereditary Adit, where quicksand lies, so it rests on a two-metre concrete slab; an earlier hotel on the spot collapsed in 1916.
The “Wojciech” tipping bridge of 1910-1913 stands on Wojciecha Drzymały street. It is a steel-and-concrete structure from which sand backfill was tipped into a mine shaft, with wagons emptying by gravity when their floors were opened. It is one of few such structures preserved in Poland. That mining world is explored in an article on mines in new roles.
Beside the palace and the mottes, it is worth checking the attractions of Zabrze, its industrial sites and its museums. Monuments from other parts of the voivodeship are gathered under historic sites in Silesia.
The palace in Mikulczyce at Lipowa 11 is regarded as the oldest surviving one. Its beginnings probably go back to the sixteenth century.
Two are included here, in Mikulczyce and in Rokitnica. Both date from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.
Because the building rises above an adit in which quicksand lies. An earlier hotel collapsed in 1916.
Sand backfill was tipped from it into a mine shaft. It belonged to the infrastructure of the Hedwigswunsch mine, later called Pstrowski.
