Łódź rose on textiles then reinvented its empty mills
Łódź, about 120 km southwest of Warsaw, had 639,890 residents in 2025, making it Poland's fourth-largest city. A sleepy bishops' village for centuries, it exploded into a textile powerhouse in the nineteenth century, then slumped after 1989 before its centre began reviving in the 2010s.
A 1332 document from Duke Władysław the Hunchback gave Łodzia, then a village, to the Włocławek bishops, granting its people rights to graze and cut timber. King Władysław II Jagiełło gave it town rights in 1423, but it stayed a small private town of the Kuyavian bishops, surrounded by woods and marshes. When Prussia annexed it in 1793 it had just 190 residents, 44 inhabited houses, a church and a prison. The name's origin is unsettled: łódź means boat in Polish, and a 1577 seal shows a boat and oar, but it may instead come from the River Łódka, the word for willow or a personal name.
In 1820 the Congress Kingdom, a Russian client state, picked Łódź for planned industry. Rajmund Rembieliński oversaw a new centre around an octagonal square and cotton-mill colonies along Piotrkowska Street, while tax breaks drew German craftsmen. Poland's first steam loom began at Ludwik Geyer's White Factory in 1839, and the lifting of a customs barrier in 1851 opened Russian markets. Karl Scheibler's Księży Młyn grew into one of Europe's biggest industrial complexes, with 5,000 workers under one roof, and Izrael Poznański built twelve factories and a palace.
Harsh conditions made Łódź a socialist stronghold, and troops crushed a workers' revolt in May 1892. Władysław Reymont's novel The Promised Land captured its extremes of mansions, red-brick mills and slum tenements. Between the wars it became a centre of the avant-garde, and Muzeum Sztuki, opened in 1931, was Europe's first museum devoted to modern art.
The Nazis renamed the city Litzmannstadt and forced its large Jewish population into a walled ghetto before deporting them to camps. In 1945 Łódź briefly served as Poland's seat of power. Its National Film School trained Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polański, and UNESCO named it a City of Film in 2017.
Source: Łódź
