End of the century

End of the century

From 1824 r. the commune with the neighboring settlements and part of the Tatra Mountains was in private hands. When, after the collapse of the steel mills in Kuźnice, another owner of the Zakopane estates went bankrupt, Magnus Peltz, a Wrocław merchant, the property was built in 1889 r. for auction. What a time it was, someone with a sufficiently full pocket could buy Zakopane with a large piece of the Tatra Mountains. A chance arose, that despite the duration of the partitions, this piece of land will be taken over by a Polish owner – and actually, after minor adventures, it was purchased by Count Władysław Zamoyski. Meanwhile, the most famous artists from the three partitions were coming: Paderewski, Sienkiewicz, Modjeska, Witkiewicz and others. Stanisław Witkiewicz senior created the national Zakopane style based on highlander architecture and ornamentation.

A huge step towards bringing the village more and more fashionable among Poles was made by building a railway line in 1899 r. This resulted in a change in the number of arriving guests. The trip from Krakow was shortened from a two-day trip to a few hours. The attendance of newcomers has reached eight thousand per year, most of them came for purely tourism purposes, which required building new rooms for rent, willi, guesthouses and hotels. With the advent of la belle epoque, the Zakopane periodicals began, as well as skiing. Skiers became another group of Zakopane regulars at the time, except vacationers, patients, representatives of the artistic community and tourists known as pompous mountaineers. In the last years of the last century, a large brick parish church was built at the lower Krupówki Street.