Silesia historical timeline

Silesia has belonged to more states than almost any region in Europe, and each left something.

Piast, Bohemian, Habsburg

Silesia was part of early Piast Poland, fragmented into duchies, and passed to the Bohemian crown in the fourteenth century and thence to the Habsburgs. It was already a mining region — silver and lead were worked at Tarnowskie Gory from the sixteenth century on a scale that made it one of the most advanced mining districts in Europe.

Prussia and industry

Frederick the Great took most of Silesia from Austria in the 1740s, and under Prussian rule the coalfield was developed on an enormous scale through the nineteenth century. Mines, ironworks, coking plants and the railways to serve them created the conurbation, and with it a workforce drawn from the surrounding countryside — Polish-speaking, Catholic, and working for German-speaking owners.

Uprisings and division

After the First World War, three Silesian Uprisings between 1919 and 1921 and a plebiscite in 1921 resulted in the region being partitioned between Germany and the new Polish state, with the industrial core largely going to Poland. Katowice became the capital of an autonomous Silesian Voivodeship with its own parliament.

War and after

Annexed by Germany in 1939 and its Polish and Jewish populations persecuted; after 1945 the borders moved west, German populations were expelled and Poles resettled from the east. The communist period expanded coal and steel enormously.

A Jewish region too

Before 1939 Bedzin, Sosnowiec and Bielsko-Biala had large Jewish populations — Bedzin’s was more than half the town — concentrated into ghettos after 1939 and deported to Auschwitz, which lies just beyond the region’s eastern edge. The Bedzin castle synagogue ruins and the restored Mizrachi prayer house are among the few physical traces left.

Since 1989

Mine closures, unemployment and a slow, partial reinvention around services, culture and technology.