Nowa Huta

Nowa Huta, now a suburb of Krakow, is one of only two fully realized, built from scratch, socialist industrial cities (the other is Magnitogorsk in Russia). Read more about it at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta. I visited it when I was in Krakow last week and didn't think it looked all that different from parts of Kishinev, Odessa, and Kiev. The coolest part about the Nowa Huta story, though, is that the Polish people resisted the planned socialist community and Nowa Huta became a center for the solidarity movement. People protested to build a church there - for two decades - a goal which was finally realized in 1977 when The Church of Our Lady Queen of Poland was opened and consecrated by archbishop Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II to be.