Nowa Huta Letter: Ask anyone in Nowa Huta where Ronald Reagan Square is and you're unlikely to get a response. Ask, however for Plac Centralyny, or Central Square, and you will quickly be pointed in the right direction. It seems to have been a little Polish post-Soviet triumphalism - to honour the late US president associated with the ending of the cold war by naming the centre of the town most associated with communism after him.
It was, however, symbolic, and though the street sign declares Plac "Ronalda Reagana", everyone refers to it by its original name.
Nowa Huta (pronounced Nova Hoota) means new steelworks and it was intended to be the perfect socialist town. Started in 1949, the steelworks and dormitory town were deliberately built near Krakow as an industrial and working-class counterpoint to the city's intelligentsia and their cultural, literary and artistic interests.
With no environmental concern, it soon became Poland's most important industrial project, which by 1980 employed 38,000 workers.
Long scorned by the citizens of Krakow some 9km away, it was built in baroque style, and early photographs show a remarkable similarity to Paris streets with wide, tree-lined avenues and squares.
The photos do not reflect the drab greyness of much of the concrete facade, a complete contrast to the beauty of Krakow's medieval architecture.
But Marcin, a young resident, sees the positive in the regeneration of parts of the suburb of 250,000 people.
"The buildings may not be perfect but look at the trees and parks around every block," he says. "They built this place 50 years ago and did not know then how cars would be so important, but look at how much space there is for cars."
He points to all the cars parked in spaces around the apartment blocks, with room for more.
In some apartment blocks residents have agreed to pay for the facades to be painted and refurbished but in others older residents bemoan that the authorities don't do it for them. Additional apartment blocks have since been built and the ones immediately facing an expansive green area on the other side of Central Square are shorter than the blocks behind, to allow them get the sun.
This valley area has allotments and a walk around it can take up to an hour. In the distance are the smoking chimneys of the energy plant that supplies Nowa Huta's heat. Heating is still centralised and comes on automatically only when the temperature drops below a certain level three days in a row.
In his late 20s, Marcin has lived in Nowa Huta all his life and recalls that his father was just two years old when he arrived with his parents from the Silesian countryside. "The slogan was, 'Come to Nowa Huta and get a home and get a job,' and that's what they did." Giving a tour of his home town, he points from Central Square up a long, wide tree-lined boulevard which has echoes of Paris's Champs-Elysées. In the far distance at the top of the avenue there is what looks like a castle.
It is in fact the entrance to the steelworks, a lot less beautiful close up. When the Gdansk workers' protests swept the nation in 1980 Nowa Huta took up the cause.
From the steelworks the employees marched down what was then Lenin Avenue, now Solidarity Avenue, to the central square to hold protest rallies.
In the new economic order, the plant employs just 8,000 workers. "There are no economic miracles and it is sad that somebody works in the steelworks for 40 years doing a non-job," says Marcin. Twenty-five years on, two weeks of commemorations, exhibitions and concerts will be held in Solidarity's home city of Gdansk. In Krakow and Nowa Huta, the major event is a drama and musical production at Nowa Huta's Central Square.
Solidarity has lost its gloss and for young people like Marcin, the events of 25 years ago are just that - in the past. "It happened, it was real, but it's over," says the young man, concentrated like many of his generation of Poles on working for a better economic future.
But Marcin played his own role in the fight for democracy. In the year before Poland's independence he was just 13. His focus and that of the young people of Nowa Huta was Lenin's statue on Avenue of the Roses. In a persistent bid to remove the towering black monument, they took hatchets to it and threw paint and stones at it, to little avail.
Until one Sunday evening, without notice, "a crane arrived, they put a rope around his neck. Within 30 minutes he was on his side and then he was taken away." So where did Lenin go? Marcin smiles. "He is now in a roller coaster park in Sweden."
Nowa Huta was deliberately built with no churches. In the late 1950s permission was given for a church but then withdrawn and when the authorities demanded in 1960 that a cross on the site be taken down, it became the focus of a Catholic versus communist battle. Every new year during his time as bishop of Krakow, John Paul II said Mass at the Nowa Huta site. A church in the shape of a boat and called the "Lord's Ark" was eventually completed in 1977.
In the 1980s, in the final bloody years of communism, that church became a central focus where residents ran for sanctuary during the protests and riots.
