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Abisynia - a district of poverty characteristic of Sosnowiec in the interwar period. Abisynia then grew significantly. This area was inhabited mainly by the unemployed and criminals who built mud huts (sheet metal and cardboard were also used). This is what the cobblestone Torpeda wrote about her: There are different people on Abisynia: honest and thieves, more or less poor. There are those who eat twice or once a day.
Only the oldest inhabitants of the city remember her. It was located along Naftowa Street, between the Iwanogrodzko-Dąbrowska (Dęblińska) Żelazna Railroad tracks and the Brynica bed, more or less behind the buildings of the South Sosnowiec railway station, north-west of Radocha. Abisynia was established at the end of the nineteenth century, when, due to the great overpopulation of the center of the future city, some of the less well-off families who did not have a permanent source of income began to build mud huts between the railway tracks and the Brynica backwaters, using wood waste as building material, sheet metal, packaging, etc. In the interwar period, it was a typical slum district on the outskirts of a large city, and was the dirtiest stain on the honor of the authorities.
Before 1914 there was a Russian border cordon (watchtower) at the site of the later Abisynia.
At the end of the 1920s, after the outbreak of the great economic crisis, poor people evicted from their apartments for failure to pay rent began to settle there, as well as those who had failed to find a job from other regions who had come to Zagłębie Dąbrowskie in search of work. Without a building supervision permit, they built makeshift housing huts made of demolition bricks, wood waste, sheet metal, etc. In this way, until the 1930s, a large housing estate of the unemployed was created - slums on the outskirts of a large industrial city.
The spontaneously given name of the estate came from an African country (present-day Ethiopia) (and referred to other settlements of this type in industrial cities of Upper Silesia and the Dąbrowa Basin, for example Brazil, on the border of Czeladź), which due to the war with The Italians were featured on the front pages of newspapers of that time, Pekiny, Meksisko, etc. Similar exotic names were given to other poor housing estates that were being built at that time, for example in Mikołów in Upper Silesia.
The post-war propaganda of the Polish People's Republic emphasized the existence of Abisynia as a sad remnant of the capitalist period, which had no place in real socialism. For this reason, three apartment blocks were built for the inhabitants of the huts (Naftowa, Akacjowa, Różana streets), to which they were solemnly carried out on November 5, 1955. Currently, Abisynia belongs to the Śródmieście district.
Source:
1. Jan Przemsza-Zieliński "Known and ... unknown Sosnowiec" (1992), Sowa-Press, Ekspres Zagłębiowski
2. Tomasz Kostro and Anna Urgacz-Szczęsna "Sosnowiec between the wars, a story about the life of the city 1918-1939" (2014), Księży Młyn Publishing House
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