Situated in Southern Poland, Upper Silesia is soaked in hundreds of years of mining tradition. Old workers’ neighbourhoods, through their architecture and use of local motifs, remind locals and visitors alike of a time when men worked arm in arm with machines, and when Upper Silesia served as the lungs of industrial Europe.
It was here that more than 300 years ago, people traveled from around the entire country and beyond to have access to so-called “black gold.”
Beneath this raw exterior, however, lies a deep culture history, with roots that are hundreds of years old. Upper Silesia has its own dialect, which was banned for many years in Poland but survives to this day, as well as a hard material dimension, coal, which is being repurposed in the modern day.
As folklore revival is becoming all the more popular in Poland, this valuable export has become a commodity of a very different quality. Mined in Upper Silesia since the 17th century, coal played an important role not only in the Polish economy, but also for the entire European continent. Today, it is being made into jewellery, as a symbolic tribute to the land from which it came.
A symbol of hardship and work ethic
In Katowice, the capital of Upper Silesia, there are a few workspaces turning coal into a different type of precious commodity: delicate, hand-crafted jewellery. One of these is the brand I Coal You, owned and operated by Katarzyna Depa, who has been tied to the region for decades.
“Jewellery from coal is first and foremost a symbol of mining hardships,” Depa tells Euronews Culture, “coal can be not only a raw material to create heat, but also a rock, that has such sentimental value that I had not heard of before at all.”
Her clients are not only visitors to the region looking to find a unique souvenir, but also people from the region itself who view the crafts as an opportunity to represent their culture. According to Depa, these include “the daughters of miners, the wives of miners, and women, who moved out of Upper Silesia.”
“This jewellery has become a symbol of these ties to the region,” she adds.
While the trend of making jewellery from coal is a modern one, like most traditions in Upper Silesia, it has deeper roots. In fact, the first coal beads appeared in Upper Silesia in the 19th century, and were made by miners for their beloved wives and girlfriends. As Katarzyna Depa says, such beads were the simplest decorative form that could be used with this material, and thus made a quick but thoughtful gift.
Nikiszowiec, the district of miracles
At the time that she founded the brand I Coal You, Katarzyna Depa was living in Nikiszowiec, a neighborhood in Upper Silesia on the outskirts of Katowice. Although now this is a place where you are more likely to run into a group of tourists than a group of miners, you can still feel the spirit of the past in the tenement houses that remain. It was here that miners who came to Upper Silesia for work spent their lives.
“What fascinated me most about coal is this work ethic and respect,” that people have for it, says Depa, who appreciates the close ties this raw material has to the cultural history of the region.
“I saw it myself, when I lived in Nikiszowiec, when I saw rescuers entering the mines, covered in dust,” Depa adds, saying that “this ethos, this respect for this raw material, which Upper Silesia fed itself and all of Poland with, is what it’s all about.” However, in spite of the respect Poles both within and outside of the region have carried for coal, Depa argues that it has been under-utilized as a tool for making art.
“Jewellery is a beautiful medium and something that can bring us joy," she tells Euronews Culture, “when something is so commonplace, it’s easy to forget about it, but showcasing this coal in the form of jewellery also gives us the impression that, if not for coal, then nothing would be here.”
Coal has a cultural and material heritage in Poland, but also a physical one, tied to the underground landscape of the country. The fact that every lump of coal is distinct from the others means that the coal itself is equally unique. As Depa stresses, jewellery made from coal is meant to bring respect to work that is often undervalued.
“I always recommend to everyone that they go to the city of Zabrze to see the Guido mine, what the burden of working in the mines looks like,” she says, adding that this can allow people to “value the fact that they can sit in front of their computer and tackle different subjects.”
“Silesian girls have coal where their hearts should be”
Recently, many small shops selling locally made products have sprung up in Upper Silesia, making the region a brand in and of itself. Phrases written in the once-banned Silesian dialect now appear on the sides of tote bags, or on the signs outside of local bars. Statues of Upper Silesian folkloric demons, known as “beboks”, are also commonly found as ornaments on the region’s streets, similar to the gargoyles adorning French Gothic Cathedrals.
One of Poland's best-known bands, Myslovitz, has sung songs about Upper Silesia, and the mine landscape is depicted in dreamlike paintings by Grzegorz Chudy, a painter who is well-known both locally and nationally.
Even if the mines have long since ceased to extract coal on the immense scale they once did, coal remains a permanent feature of the Silesian landscape.
"Coal hearts were once in vogue, it's even become common to say that a Silesian girl has coal instead of a heart. That she has a heart made of coal," says Depa, adding that "Silesia is so individual, compared to Warsaw, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk or even Krakow, you can see it in the way people use the Silesian dialect, in the efforts to make Silesian a recognized minority language, and in the promotion of Silesian culture."
"There are so many elements that very strongly mark its distinctness, but at the same time there is this great joy of being 'different', of this individuality that is associated with Silesia," she says.
"Polish highlanders wear coral beads," says Depa, "beads that don't come from Poland, they come from Italy, there are pieces of turquoise from the Turkish wars transported in the Wawel treasury. Amber? You have to go to the sea and count your lucky stars that the sea will spit a piece of it out for you. But we can have coal here and now, we can dig it up. And that's probably the most beautiful thing about it. Besides, coal is simply beautiful as a stone."
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