Commie Blocks and Us!

Hi, my name is Mikołaj, I am a lover of commie blocks. I absolutely love the hell out of these massive, ugly, Stalinist concrete blocks that make my country look like a giant graveyard from the comfort of an airplane seat. I think they are functional, aesthetically pleasing when colourful, and save so much space for green spaces etc.

The photos above are taken by me (except of the first one, which ironically looks exactly like my neighbourhood lol) in my home city of Płock!, ignore that the pic of me is from when I was a teenager and looked like a baby!

I lived a lot of my life in these types of areas and it was clean, spacious… green, kids had parks right next to home, local shop was always 2 minutes away and we had a public gym with a great community, the local guys turned an old tennis court nobody used into an awesome DIY skatepark that attracted lots of cool people and music, and the football court was a 24/7 fifa lobby that I spent a lot to my childhood in. All of this within a couple metres.

These days I am shocked to see how many westerners and people from Eastern Europe seem to hate these buildings and have stories that sound like they’ve been ripped out of a Steven king, in my opinion when it comes to many peoples negative connotations and prejudgements they are often not actually to do with the architecture itself, they are usually about how bad the area was or is. I think in Western countries there are also bad neighbourhoods with with rows of little houses and somehow not many people hate on those, I think our blocks get too much of a bad rep around the world for no good reason!

Personally I love these buildings. They bring back some of my fondest memories 🙂, and the inside of most of these would always be so funny … the shittest lobby but every house you step into looks like the Hilton hotel, super clean, beautiful furniture, constantly refurbished etc, and I have so many funny stories with my neighbours because you actually see them all the time and get to naturally befriend them more than on a road with little houses, after all those people have heard you screaming at a game of counter strike, and you probably heard them doing all sorts of things at night if your building was anything like mine… and everyone being so isolated in western countries like my experience from living in the UK for university… I really just missed home for most of my time there, the place was beautiful but I just felt that it was a little bit empty?

If you grew up in one of these truly Slavic neighbourhoods and have any amazing photos or funny stories that can’t be forgotten drop them below! It’ll be fun comparing how different our experiences were and seeing what everyone feels, let’s show our bad boys some love! 🏢🏢🏢🏢🇵🇱

by Mekawai