Szklarska Poręba owes its name not to mountains or a river but to a craft that settled in this valley long before today's ski resort. For centuries, glassworks wandered through the forests of the Karkonosze (Giant Mountains) and the Izera Mountains, until one of them, Józefina, settled here for good and gave rise to a tradition that has survived to this day under the name Julia.

Glassworks that followed the forest

Before permanent, brick works appeared in the 19th century, glass production in the Sudetes relied on so-called wandering glassworks. Melting glass required enormous quantities of wood: it fuelled the furnaces, and potash needed to melt quartz sand was obtained from wood ash. Once the surrounding forest within an economical transport radius had been used up, it was simpler to build a new furnace a little further on, closer to the next stand of timber, than to haul wood and quartz over long distances down the valley. That is why successive generations of glassworks moved up the slopes, leaving burned clearings behind them.

Glass melted this way was called forest glass, from the Latin vitrum silvestre. It had a characteristic greenish tint, which was not a deliberate decorative effect but the result of iron impurities present in the local sand and ash. Only later purification techniques made it possible to obtain colourless, fully transparent glass, on which a cutter's skill could be shown off.

Traces of this itinerant economy can also be seen in the surrounding towns. Czerniawa-Zdrój grew up in the 17th century around a glassworks belonging to the Schaffgotsch family, when Czech Protestants fleeing religious persecution settled there; this was the same family that, two centuries later, founded the works in Szklarska Poręba.

The birth of Józefina

The Józefina glassworks in Szklarska Poręba was founded by Count Leopold von Schaffgotsch, and construction began in March 1841. The first products left the works in mid-1842, and the official opening is dated to 8 July that year. The works' name comes from the founder's wife's first name. Construction and the first years of operation were overseen by Franz Pohl, the last representative of the Czech Preussler family of glassmaking masters, who had practised the craft for generations on the other side of the mountains.

Already in its first year of operation the factory employed 135 people, and its infrastructure included a melting furnace, a crushing mill for preparing raw material, a cutting shop and warehouses. So from the start it was an industrial plant, not another wandering forest glassworks: a permanent site equipped with a production line covering both melting and finishing of the finished products.

Fame at the London exhibition

The Józefina works gained Europe-wide fame at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Among the items shown there were two blue-and-white crystal goblets with engraved portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, works that showed the glassmakers from the Kamienna river could compete with the best works on the continent. From that point on, Józefina's products reached customers far beyond Silesia, and the works itself was ranked among the best in the world in its field.

From Józefina to Julia

After 1945, when Szklarska Poręba became part of Poland, production at the former Józefina was not interrupted, although the workforce and management of the plant changed. From 1956 the factory operated under a new name, the Julia Crystal Glassworks, and it operated under that name until its closure in the 1990s.

In the post-war decades, acclaimed glass artists worked at the works, among them Henryk Albin Tomaszewski and Jan Owsiewski, as well as the married couple Regina and Aleksander Puchała. It was in this period, in 1953-1955, that Julia produced the chandeliers and wall lamps that hung under the ceilings of Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science, one of the more recognisable achievements of Silesian artistic glassmaking in post-war Poland.

The cutter's hand

The decoration of crystal from Szklarska Poręba was based on hand cutting, that is, giving smooth or faceted patterns to the surface using rotating grinding wheels with loose abrasive agents added, with the finish then polished to full transparency. Engraving, as in the case of the goblets bearing the monarchs' portraits mentioned above, additionally required working directly on the glass surface with an engraving tool. This difference between machine forming and hand finishing determined the value of individual pieces: the more work put in by the cutter and engraver, the more unique the piece.

Raw material for production did not have to be hauled from far away. In the Izera Mountains, at an altitude of 1,050 metres above sea level, the open-pit "Stanisław" quartz mine operated, regarded as the highest-situated mine of its kind in Central Europe. Milky and pink quartz with a silica content approaching one hundred per cent was extracted there, going precisely to the glass industry as well as the metallurgical and electronics industries.

What remains today

The factory in its former form no longer operates, but traces of Szklarska Poręba's glassmaking tradition can still be seen on the spot. The town remains a centre where minerals and stones are the subject of dedicated collections: the Mineralogical Museum, housed in a historic villa from 1885, shows a collection of minerals and fossils, including specimens from the Karkonosze and the Izera Mountains, while the "Juna" Earth Museum, in the former Walloon Watchtower, displays, among other things, a collection of fluorescent minerals, visible under ultraviolet light. Both institutions, though not direct heirs of the glassworks, help explain well why this particular area, rich in quartz and other minerals, has had natural conditions for glassmaking to develop for four centuries.