Piaski EN
Z Strona o Żydach lubelskich
Only a few of today’s inhabitants of Lublin can identify this name with today’s vicinity of the railway station and the Bychawski Square. However, Piaski is one of the oldest suburbs of Lublin, existing as early as 15th century (at that time it was still a village). Piaski was known as a suburb already in 17th century. Situated near Bystrzyca, far from the historical centre of the city, it was connected to Lublin only in the end of the 19th century. Because Piaski was a suburb inhabited mainly by the most impoverished Jewish population, in the first half of the 19th century it was called Jewish Kazimierz, although many writers describing Lublin stated that it was an erroneous name. As a Jewish-Polish suburb Piaski was described by Isaac Bashevis Singer in his novel The Magician of Lublin. Later on many readers confused it with a little town Piaski Luterskie. The proof for the Jewish character of the suburb is the fact that until interwar period the only sacral building that could be found there was a synagogue, funded as a wooden building in 18th century and made of bricks in 1864. It was destroyed during the Nazi occupation. Now in this place stands the building of the Polish Catholic Church. Inside we can read a commemorative plaque informing us of the synagogue in Piaski. Till the end of the nineteenth century Piaski resembled a traditional Polish-Jewish shtetl with small poor shops and crafstman’s workshops. Only in the time of building the railway line in 1877 the the appearance of the district started to change, from the one of a shabby wooden suburb into the one of the industrial centre of the city.”Gazeta Lubelska” described these changes in such a way, “In the place of little wooden houses emerged one and two storey brick houses. Earlier Piaski was inhabited mainly by the Israelites and impoverished labouring class. Nowadays the population of Piaski is constituted mainly by clerks and officials supervising the construction of the railroad, industrialists etc.” However, till the beginning of the twentieth century the district suffered the lack of decent shops, replaced by the Jewish stalls, and even the lack of cobbled roads. A kind of trade-craft centre of Piaski was at that time the Bychawski Square. The first Polish shop appeared here only in 1901, but the inhabitants of Piaski still preferred to buy everything from the Jews because they had smaller prices. When the railway line was built the street was to connect Piaski and Lublin. That was Foksal Street, already in 1928 changed into 1 May Street. In 1874 Agricultural Machines Factory of Mieczysław Wolski was built in this street. The factory is one of the oldest industrial plants in Lublin. Now factory buildings still stand, partly permanent ruin, partly used to other purposes. In 1 May Street we may also find one of the oldest, and one of the few functioning cinemas in Lublin, the cinema “Worker”. During the Second World War period it was called “Rialto”. Nowadays, although there are no merchants or craftsmen in Piaski, it still remains a commercial district. Now, as in the second half of the nineteenth century, the district is not a very elegant place but surely a very busy one.
Robert Kuwałek
Translation by Łukasz Garbol
