Zabrze
— a city built on coal, still warm with it.
Not only on a wall.
“A working city of about 167,000 in Upper Silesia, between Gliwice and Bytom. The Guido coal mine still runs lifts down 320 metres for visitors. Above ground, the old colliery towers and the brick churches of the central district share the skyline with the cardiology hospital where Zbigniew Religa performed Poland's first successful heart transplant in 1985. A quiet city, not a pretty one. Worth the walk for the texture it carries.
Zabrze, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Zabrze sits in the Silesian Voivodeship of southern Poland, part of the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Area that stretches from Gliwice to Katowice. The city covers roughly 80 square kilometres on the watershed between the Oder and the Vistula river basins. Coal mining shaped the modern town from the early nineteenth century. The Guido mine, founded by Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck in 1855, now operates as the Coal Mining Museum. Population at the 2021 census was approximately 167,000, making Zabrze one of the central cities of Upper Silesian industrial heritage.
The historical architecture concentrates along Wolności Street, the long central axis cut through the city in the nineteenth century. The Church of St. Anne, completed in 1900 in red brick neo-Gothic, anchors the southern end. The parish church of St. Joseph, designed by Dominikus Böhm in 1931, is one of the early monuments of modernist sacred architecture in Poland. The Donnersmarck Palace and the surrounding brick worker housing of the colliery districts are protected within the Upper Silesian industrial heritage register.
The Guido Mine on 3 Maja Street takes visitors 170, 320, and 355 metres below the surface in original colliery cages. The neighbouring Queen Luise Adit complex, the oldest preserved coal mine in Upper Silesia, runs as a second site. The Silesian Centre for Heart Diseases, founded by Zbigniew Religa in 1984, sits on Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej Street and continues as a leading Polish cardiology hospital. Regional trains link Zabrze to Katowice in about 25 minutes and to Gliwice in 10.