Literary depictions of the iconic landscape of the village of Mogiła (1795–1918) destroyed by the large-scale industrial and housing development of Nowa Huta

In the course of the 19th century the landscape of the village Mogiła and its environs acquired the status of a religious and cultural heritage site. An ancient mound of the legendary Princess Wanda and the associations of the Kościuszko Uprising (1794) exerted a strong appeal to the imagination of Polish writers and their readers. Moreover, as the article argues, the great reverence which was attached to Cracow, Poland’s old royal capital, rubbed off on Mogiła. Made in 1949, the decision to build Nowa Huta, a giant steelworks and a modern new town, at that very place meant the desecration of a portion of the fabric of Poland’s national heritage.