Lodz

Lodz - darkometer rating : 3 - The third-largest city in Poland (after Warsaw and Krakow ), and one of its youngest. Lodz was basically born out of the industrial revolution, especially textile manufacturing. In WWII the city was taken over by Germany and the second-largest Jewish ghetto was set up here, and most of its inhabitants were murdered in the Holocaust . The specific dark-tourism sites relate largely to that period, but there are also a few other aspects. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: First things first: the correct Polish pronunciation of this place is NOT “lodge” but “woodge”! Note the diacritic line through the letter L in the correct Polish spelling: Łodź . And the <ł> is what in English is /w/. (For simplicity's sake, however, I'll continue using the spelling without special characters.) Even though the first records of a settlement at this location go back to the late Middle Ages, Lodz remained an insignificant and small town for most of its earlier history , during which it also passed from Prussian annexation (in the 18th century) to Russian rule and to being part of independent Poland . The city's heyday came with the industrial revolution . In the 19th century Lodz became one of the world's largest centres of the textile industry . It was sometimes referred to as the “Polish Manchester”. The boom triggered waves of immigration to provide the workforce for the spinning mills and surrounding industrial operations. Thus many Jews arrived in the city, also many migrants from Germany . At the very top, super-rich dynasties of textile magnates formed, most of them Jewish.