Łódź grew from a 700-person farming village into Europe's fastest-expanding textile city in barely fifty years, then became the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Its past is written in palaces, workers' colonies and cemeteries rather than castles — and most of it still stands.
Poland's only joint archaeology-ethnography museum, in an 1875 neoclassical building on Plac Wolności. Lusatian urnfield pottery, Przeworsk-culture iron-age graves and medieval finds from the Łódź village sit below the folk galleries.
The Old Market Square was the entire town when King Władysław Jagiełło granted Łódź town rights in 1423, and it stayed a farming settlement of 700 souls until 1820. The brick Assumption church of 1888 replaced the wooden parish church that stood here.
The oldest surviving building in Łódź: a larch-log church raised on the Old Market in 1765-68, then dismantled and moved beam by beam to Ogrodowa in 1888 when the brick church replaced it. Baroque side altars and a shingled bell tower survive inside.
Opened in 1855 and divided into Catholic, Evangelical and Orthodox quarters, this is where the German, Polish and Russian dynasties that built industrial Łódź lie together. The neo-Gothic Scheibler mausoleum of 1888 is the largest tomb chapel in Poland.
Israel Poznański's neo-Renaissance palace of 1888-1903, built flush against his cotton mill so he could watch the looms. Thirty-six restored rooms include the mirrored ballroom, plus the Pantheon of Great Łodzians honouring Rubinstein, Tuwim and Reymont.
The city's first planned square, laid out in 1823 as Nowy Rynek at the head of Piotrkowska. Tadeusz Kościuszko's statue rose in 1930, was dynamited by German troops in November 1939 and recast in 1960; the 1827 town hall faces the Lutheran church across it.
Ludwik Geyer's White Factory of 1835-38 housed the first steam engine in the Kingdom of Poland and started the boom that made the city. Galleries run from hand looms to Jacquard punch cards, and relocated weavers' cottages stand in the park behind.
Neo-Gothic cathedral built 1901-12 with money from the Scheibler and Heinzel industrialist families; its 104m spire is among the tallest church towers in Poland. German occupiers used the nave as a warehouse and the stained glass was walled up for safety.
From this wooden freight station 145,000 people were deported out of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto to Chełmno and Auschwitz between January 1942 and August 1944. Original cattle wagons stand on the rails and a 140m concrete tunnel lists every transport by date.
The largest Jewish burial ground in Europe — 42 hectares, roughly 180,000 graves, opened in 1892. Poznański's mosaic-domed mausoleum is the biggest Jewish tomb anywhere, and the Ghetto Field holds some 43,000 wartime burials. Shut Saturdays and Jewish holidays.
Karol Scheibler's self-contained factory town of the 1870s-90s: thirty rows of red-brick workers' houses with their own school, shop, fire station and hospital ringing the spinning mill. Herbst Palace at Przędzalniana 72 shows how the owning family lived.
Laid out in 2004 on former ghetto ground, with a tree planted by each survivor who came back — over 600 so far, each with a name plaque. The Mound of Memory rises above the Avenue of Survivors and the Marek Edelman Dialogue Centre sits at the park's edge.