Młyny wietrzne w panoramie wsi

With the moment of appearing the agricultural and food-processing industrial buildings in the village panorama among the country houses and buildings, new elements have come out to shape its character and cultural landscape. Among small sized country buildings and structures where the dominants were the sacral buildings, manors and groups of land farming buildings, the sub-dominants appeared in the form of grain mills, distilleries, sugar factories and other industrial buildings. Their prevailing position in the village panorama is due to their size and capacity, the material applied in their construction, and sometimes the elevation form. Apart from the technical elements (block, structure, material, and architectural form) a location of the given group of production unit was important. Weather the building is located within the country houses, in a farming buildings group, on the edge of the village, or in an independent location - it does significantly influence the way they are perceived. The clarity of the dominant or merely a characteristic silhouette of the industrial building is very distinct in the case of placing it in an open landscape. This factor is especially significant in the case of windmills. Commonly found in the end of the 19th century, windmills in the outskirts of towns and cities did not have any chance to survive in the succeeding decades. The competition from industrial mills and development of residential settlements cruelly and forcibly eliminated them from the suburban landscape. In the country areas these processes took place at a slightly slower pace, however, within the last 50-60 years also the windmills began to disappear quickly from the village landscape. Seeing the advancing degradation in diversification of the village landscape, it seems justifiable to draw attention to the need of protection of groups of production buildings, or more broadly - the protection of cultural landscape created by them. In this paper, the issue of occurrence of buildings of industrial function has been presented in the example of windmills located in the area of Przemęt, county of Wolsztyn. The mills' spatial unity with their surrounding has been presented along with their role in creation of historic image of the villages. The selected examples describe different forms of usage and conditions of preservation of these buildings.