Kraków: Concrete Churches and Socialist Utopias

Brutalist religious architecture in Poland’s Nowa Huta’s workers’ district.

This collection highlights Kraków’s striking Modernist and Brutalist churches, including two photographed in Nowa Huta. Born from a utopian socialist vision under Stalin’s guidance, Nowa Huta is the largest planned socialist district ever built, designed as a “workers’ paradise”. Its location was chosen to challenge Kraków’s bourgeois medieval Old Town, creating a contrasting juxtaposition of ideologies and aesthetics.

Written and photographed by Alexandra van der Essen