Kielce
This article is about the Polish city. For the cargo ship named after it, which sank in 1946, see Kielce (ship).
Kielce ['kʲɛlt͡sɛ] ( 
, German Kjelzy) is the capital of the Holy Cross Voivodeship in southeastern Poland, located about 120 km from Kraków and about 170 km from the capital Warsaw. Kielce, with about 200,000 inhabitants, is ranked seventeenth on the list of cities in Poland.
The large city in the Holy Cross Mountains is the seat of two universities and the bishopric of Kielce of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. Kielce is a processing and trading centre for agricultural products and an important location for the metal and food industries.
History
In the 10th century the church of St. Adalbert was built. Later a church on the castle hill was added.
1212 was the first documentary mention of Kielce.
In 1227 the town received the town charter. In the second half of the 13th century, the city suffered from the Mongol storm. However, she quickly recovered.
In the 14th century Kielce was granted the town charter of Magdeburg. In 1496 it received its coat of arms from the Archbishop of Gniezno, Cardinal Frederick Jagiello, from the Jagiellonian dynasty. The golden letters CK mean Civitas Kielcensis (Citizenship of Kielce).
Kielce grew rapidly in the 16th and 17th centuries due to the development of iron ore mining. The influx of Italians, Hungarians, Germans and Slovaks shaped the city. In 1645 it had about 1250 inhabitants. During this period the town acquired a castle, the Church of the Holy Trinity, a Cistercian monastery and a hospital. The attack of the Swedes and the following turmoil caused by plundering and epidemics stopped the positive development.
As a result of the Third Partition of Poland, Kielce fell to Austria in 1795 and was annexed to Galicia. Kielce became the seat of one of the 13 counties of Western Galicia. In 1809 it became part of the Duchy of Warsaw, which from 1815 was under Russian suzerainty as Congress Poland. Kielce won in 1816 against Miechów, Pilica and Pińczów as a candidate for the new capital of Kraków Voivodeship, after the Republic of Kraków was spun off with Kraków. In 1837 the Lutheran-Augsburg parish in Kielce was spun off from Radom.
The boom at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century made itself felt in Kielce mainly due to the connection to the Polish railway network in 1885. The first census in the Russian Empire in 1897 recorded a population of 23,178.
In 1919 Kielce became the capital of the voivodeship of the same name in the re-established Poland. In 1939, 71,000 people lived in the city.
During the German invasion of Poland, Kielce was occupied by the Wehrmacht on 4 September 1939. The SS established the Kielce Ghetto in 1941.
Kielce was at the same time an important centre of the Polish resistance. In and around Kielce various partisan groups were active (Hubalczycy). But also secret educational institutions up to university level were represented and prevented a complete drop in the level of knowledge. In the course of the Vistula-Oder operation Kielce was captured by the Red Army on January 15, 1945.
In July 1946, the city was the scene of the Kielce pogrom, in which a local Polish mob attacked Jewish Holocaust survivors and returnees from the Soviet Union under the eyes of the police and army, murdering 42 of them and injuring about 80 others.
Traffic
Kielce lies on the Warsaw-Krakow and Kielce-Czestochowa railway lines.
