Kowary is today associated mainly with a post-war uranium mine, but for more than a hundred and fifty years the town lived off a completely different industry - weaving and carpet production, of which only traces remain on its walls and in the collections of the local museum.

Where weaving in this area came from

Since the Middle Ages Kowary had been associated with mining - iron ore was extracted here. When, after the Thirty Years' War, that is from the mid-17th century, extraction began to decline, the inhabitants looked for another source of income and turned to textiles. The town specialised in bleaching linen cloth and producing so-called white yarn, which became a local speciality. In 1720 Gottfried Latschke founded in Kowary one of the first linen manufactories in Lower Silesia, laying the foundations for the town's weaving tradition for centuries to come.

The factory that migrated from Wleń

According to tradition, in 1856 the Smyrna Carpet Factory was moved to Kowary from Wleń, giving rise to a new branch of local industry - carpet production, which survived until post-war times. The name "Smyrna" referred to the Turkish city of Smyrna, today's Izmir, from which the whole style of densely woven woollen carpets modelled on oriental rugs originated. Products of this kind were made by hand-knotting - knot by knot, the pile thread was tied onto the warp, which set them apart from machine-woven carpets and made the process far more labour-intensive.

The factory that survived two political systems

The plant operated without interruption for more than a hundred and fifty years, passing through Prussian rule, the era of the German Reich and, after 1945, as a Polish state enterprise. In post-war Kowary the carpet factory, alongside the bleaching and dyeing plants and the technical felt factory, was one of the pillars of the local textile industry. Its products had an established reputation in People's Poland - a carpet from Kowary remained in the public mind a symbol of desirable domestic comfort, a good for which one usually had to wait, or make an effort to obtain.

The end of the tradition

The economic transformation at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s changed the plant's fate. Between 1989 and 2001 the factory was privatised, and the new, private owner continued production for a few more years. Ultimately, in 2009, after almost a hundred and fifty years of uninterrupted activity, it was declared bankrupt. This brought to an end one of the longest industrial traditions in Kowary - longer than the history of the local uranium mining, which today draws far more attention to the town.

What remains of it

The building of the former factory no longer produces carpets today. Instead it houses the Museum of Sentiments, a private collection of recreated interiors from the communist era. On the wall of the building a mosaic depicting a carpet in the Izmir style has survived - the only legible trace today of an industry that for a century and a half gave work to the town's inhabitants. Anyone looking in Kowary for mementoes of the old factory should start at this very address, as the town has no separate exhibition devoted to carpet production itself.