Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Piła
Summary
Piła (ˈpiwa; Schneidemühl) is a city in northwestern Poland and the capital of Piła County, situated in the Greater Poland Voivodeship. Its population was 71,846, making it the city in the voivodeship after Poznań and Kalisz and the largest city in the northern part of Greater Poland. The city is located on the Gwda river and is famous for its green areas, parks and dense forests nearby. It is an important road and railway hub, located at the intersection of two main lines: Poznań–Szczecin and Bydgoszcz–Krzyż Wielkopolski.
Piła is a Polish word meaning "saw". This was a typical name denoting a village of woodcutters belonging to a local noble. The German name Schneidemühl means "sawmill".
Piła traces its origins to an old fishing village. Following the German colonist movement of the 13th century, and particularly after the end of the first Mongol invasion of Poland of 1241, many German colonizers came to this densely wooded area of Poland. General immigration of German settlers diminished, however, when Poland, under King Casimir IV Jagiellon (1447–1492), finally defeated the Teutonic Order in 1466.
A Slavic settlement of woodcutters in the fishing village Piła may have existed before any of the later villages and surrounding towns of the area were established. Thus, in the 14th century Piła grew to some extent because of its position on the Gwda a mere from where it joins the river Notec. Yet, the settlement developed less than others that were on such major water routes as the rivers Warta or Vistula. Piła's simple layout of unpaved streets and primitive clay and timber houses gave little protection to its inhabitants and was still far from becoming a commercially interesting locale. If one were to credit a Privilegium (charter) of the early 1380s as evidence, a document associated with the building of a church in Piła and ascribed to the very young Polish Queen Jadwiga of Poland—a copied document that still existed in the archives of the town before 1834—then that period could well be regarded as the time when the village of Piła/Snydemole was elevated to the status of town.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.