Introduction

"Lodz is beautiful. Its mysterious climate I like the most. Lodz made me start dreaming again."

n the middle of the Russian empire, in the centre of ethnic Poland a multi-national city was born. It became an important industrial centre in no time at all. Within the XIX century Lodz was the only city in Europe to increase the number of its inhabitants 1500 times. The rising population was mainly due to people migration into the country, especially German. They were heading for the country like gold prospectors in Sacramento looking for better life and fortune.

It is a wise politics of Polish Kindgom that made many German weavers leave their homeland. Special agents were sent to Slask, Saxony, Czech and to the lands upon the Rhine to convince German craftsmen about moving into Polish lands giving them promises of better trade conditions. Thanks to the know-how of their craftsmen Lodz quickly became an industrial city.

In 1827 Krystian Wendish opened the first cotton yarn factory. In 1829 Ludwik Geyer started the second one. Pretty soon Germans became the industrial elite of the city. Within the 14 largest families, 9 had German origins: these were Scheibler-Herbst, Geyer, Heinzl, Grohman, Eisert, Biedermann, Schweikert, Bennich i Steinert. 56% of all the enterprises employing over 1000 workers belonged to the Germans.

Over the years Lodz got known as a city of "the unlimited opportunities where money lies in the streets". These are all various nationalities: German, Polish, Jewish and Russian that created the shape of the city. Multi-national Lodz ceased in 1939. From among Jewish and German only few were left after the second world war.

However, the city of unique architecture of palaces and old factories can still be seen now. "Factories are the real jewels of Lodz..."(D. Lynch). We presented the history of the richest factory families in more detail in our work "Ex Navicula Navis". The pictures of the huge industrial complexes and of their owners' palaces can be found there.

We are not historians and we are not presenting a scientific document. We would only like to present what fascinated us while our research. We wanted to tell a story about some people who created an evangelic community building their church and about bringing it back to glory. We wanted to mention the oldest cemetry of Lodz and efforts that are made to preserve its historical shape. We wanted to tell how rich industrialists used to live.

The architectural perfection of the buildings, palaces, detached houses as well as hitherto existing in Lodz factory premises can be appreciated while looking at Mrs Lucja Robak's illustrations(reprints by permission of the author).