Every city of a relatively rich history has preserved traces of its past in its modern image. It also applies to Lodz, though the material traces of its oldest beginnings either disappeared or were obliterated in the 19th and 20th cc., together with the development of a large industrial metropolis. There are but few elements of the layout that have been preserved until today going back to the times when a humble urban settlement dragged out its wretched existence in the forests of the Mazovian and Great Poland's frontier. The relic of those days is the lay-out of a few streets and the shape of two squares. A strangely oblique lay-out of building plots in certain parts of the city-centre reminds us of the ancient system of fields surrounding medieval Lodz. The major predominance in our cityscape is the legacy of the industrial epoch - the regular system of streets and plots, the quarters filled in with tenements and residences, large and small factories.

The last century Lodz was a creation of many different ethnic groups. It rendered itself for them as a 'promised land', sometimes but an episode in their migration, or their 'small fatherland' they took root to gradually. The newcomers were of diverse origin, customs, language and religion. What they had in common was their place of abode, and first of all occupation. Although they passed by each other in the same streets, together crossed the factory gates and took loans in the same banks, they yet formed different communities, rarely mixing with one another. They had their own temples, cemeteries, cultural institutions, and schools.

Today it is first of all the architecture and the necropolises that remain the most suggestive, if not the only, remains of a multi-cultural centre, in the first decades of the 20th c. still inhabited by the Poles, Jews, Germans, Russians, Czechs, not counting other nationalities. Apart from the historical legacy, connected with the already closed up history of the ethnic groups living there up till World War 2, there is also modern Lodz. At least several public buildings erected after 1945 seem to have implanted themselves successfully into the local cityscape - they have become its important and valuable complement.