Czwartek
Lublin is built around four hills, and one of these is Cwartek.
They say that the hill got its name from the Thursday market once held
there, but it could also easily have been because it was the fourth hill.
The most noticable feature of Czwartek is the church, sw Mikolaj (St Nicholas)
on top of the hill, near the steep scarp face that drops down to the flat
bottom of the Czerniowka river below. Like many places that become absorbed
into larger communities, it is not easy to define the borders, particularly
when other, newer, communities spring up nearby and over the years blend
with the old. One loose definition, and the one we will use here, is that
of Lubartowska street in the west, the foot of the hill in the south, and
the edge of the hill of the old Jewish cemetery in the southeast. The northern
edge is more difficult as, unlike the othersides, the northern side
of the hill has a very shallow slope and traditionally this was an area
of fields and pasture belonging to the community.
sw Mikolaj
on Cwartek hill.
Archeologists have discovered remains of a community on the hill dating back to the 6th century, long before any historical records were kept and the earliest signs of a community in Lublin found to date. With Lublin being a walled city there was always a need for markets outside the walls, because markets need space to keep animals, feed, access to water etc. having a market outside the walls also means that you do not have to pay the higher tax to the city council, and were often set up by local land owners with an eye for profit.
When you walk around the area these days you can see parts of older Czwarteks in between the newer, with many blocks of flats in the northern part from the 1970's onwards. The western side has many signs of older industrial use and its close ties to the former Jewish part of Lublin is clear in the architecture of the late 19th and early 20th century apartment blocks lining Lubartowska as well as the former Jewish hospital and college. The northern part also contains several cemeteries, although only one of these is still in current use, the ever expanding Unicka Roman Catholic one.
An examination of the cemeteries is a good place to start to get a taste of the people of Czwartek, burial place of Lublin. Traditionally churches were surrounded by their own graveyards, and the church on Czwartek hill is no exception to this, although there are few signs nowadays of this former use. The Jewish population was an exception in that they established their own cemetery, on nearby Grodzka hill by the 16th century. Other faiths were going to have to wait until the early 19th century when the growth in the city of Lublin finally made it obvious how impractical, and unhealthy it was to keep burying more and more people in the same small plots. At this time a new cemetery was established for the city on what is now Lipowa street, away on the other side from Czwartek, for Roman Catholics, Orthodox (Christian) and Protestant faiths. Soon after even the extensive 'old' Jewish cemetery reached its capacity and a new one became necessary. By the middle of the 19th century the Uniates, or Greek Catholics, bought a plot of land on the north side of Czwartek, and the Jews bought another plot not far from them. The Uniates had there main church at the foot of the Czwartek hill, which is still there today although it is now Orthodox, on the edge of the most dense part of the Jewish quarter of Lublin. So, for both of these groups, the Czwartek site was ideal.
Neither of these cemeteries are in use, while the 'end' of the history of Jews in Lublin is relatively widely known to anyone who reads up about Jews in Poland or about Lublin, the Uniates are almost forgotten. Perhaps at this point it is worth mentioning a little about their history. The Uniate church was a breakaway part of the Orthodox, or Greek-Catholic church, a number of Orthodox bishops in what is now part of Belarus, Ukraine and a little of Poland decided that as the control that the Orthodox Church had over its priests in the region which was part of the Polish-Lithuanian union was too weak. They had a meeting at Brest (not that far from Lublin, just inside what is now Belarus, the meeting was called the 'Brest Union', hence the name 'Uniate')) and decided to hand control over to the Roman Catholic Pope, but retaining the Greek Catholic rites. The Russian Tsars were never happy with this, and in 1875 they decided to ban the Uniate Church, the uniate church became an Orthodox one and the cemetery went out of use. Today it is a green open space and almost no one in the city realizes what it is, even though the busy road that passes it is called 'Unicka'. Behind this cemetery, and adjacent to the Jewish one, another Roman Catholic cemetery was opened in the 1950's(?).
Much of Czwartek seems to have been owned by the Roman Catholic church, the area to the north and east of the sw. Mikolaj church is mainly a school, called the Bishop's school.
Czwartek Through Maps
Here there are maps covering nearly 200 years of Czwartek's history, but as they are drawn in different styles and the amount of change so high I have highlighted 4 features that appear on all the maps. They are:
- Trakt Lubartowski (present day ulica Lubartowska) [parallel pink lines]
- sw Mikolaj church [heavy pink border]
- Uniate/Orthodox church [pink circle]
- The castle [thin pink border]
Note that the maps are of different scales, the earlier ones showing much less area than the later ones. I have done this so that the detail can be seen on the earlier maps, and the increased area of Czwartek in later times. The shape of the buildings changed over the years, as did the map makers impression of them! Some roads have remained on their original alignments, some have changed and a whole lot more have appeared.
On Lubartowska we can see a building marked 'Fab. Wag', 'fabryka' means factory, and 'wag' means scales - this is the Hess scales company, which remained on this site until at least the 1960's when it was moved to the other side of Lublin (and until 2002 there was a factory shop on the other side of the road, when that too was moved). At the top there is an area marked 'Cegielnia', brickyards, which again were operating until about the 1960's, as was another one marked on the right of the map. The 'Osada Dziecieca' was a children's home, but that has now long gone.
Special buildings marked on the map are:
33:
34:
35:
36: Jewish hospital
64: Jewish college
69: Bishop's school
75:
86:
|
Website written & maintained by: Trevor & Ania Butcher