Weird villa thing

 

With certain "mindsets" becoming more and more prevalent on social media nowadays, I decided to put some effort into being trendy. 

I invaded Poland. 

In all seriousness, Poland has some great abandoned places and some of them are pretty quirky. I saw a youtube video about this wacky wreck years ago, and I couldn't help but add it to my to-do list. As is the style for that particular video platform, the youtubers weird heads were on camera more than the house itself, so I didn't get a good look at it, but the video did claim that a boy had been murdered here.

How intriguing!

But it's Youtube we're talking about, which means me claiming that my left testicle is Princess Diana has a higher probability of being true. 

But it's impossible to look at this place and not feel a hint of curiosity. It was evidently built by someone with eccentric tastes. Someone wanted something unique, and I can't help but admire that. 

Prior to this house being built, two little old ladies had a house here, and they were much beloved by the locals, who sometimes despair that their home was demolished to make way for this "monstrosity."

And I kinda see their point. I mean, I don't think this is a monstrosity (but then, Abba was on the radio at the time of writing, so the bar has been raised a bit too high) but I can see why some locals might think this is a bit of an eyesore. It clashes with.... everywhere, actually. It doesn't matter what residential neighbourhood you build this in. It will look out of place, and someone's gonna moan. 

I love it! Let's slip inside! 

Immediately on the inside is this huge (roughly) circular room full of old building supplies. There was a cement mixer here once, according to previous urbex posts, but it seems to have been yoinked. 

Nevertheless, there's enough here to tell us something pretty intriguing. This place was never finished. 

This building was owned by a chap called Andrzej, whose name I probably can't pronounce. Why is there a Z in there? What's that for?

Interestingly, Andrzej's ownership is the only slither of factual information I've been able to squeeze out of the locals, and even then someone disputed it.

And there's the issue. For every claim made by one of the locals, someone else pipes up, claiming that they are wrong. It's given this entire building a haze of uncertainty that makes me say "Allegedly" a lot. 

Allegedly this house was built in the early 2000s, standing here as far back as 2005. Rumour has it that it was actually intended to be a brothel, but this is generally dismissed by many as a load of hogwash, in favour of the more prevalent story, that it was intended to be a hotel. There are people out there who insist that both these things are wrong.

There are differing stories about whether Andrzej had the villa built or if he just purchased it once construction had stopped, but either way, construction was ordered to cease. Once again, there are differing stories around the circumstances. Some say that construction had gone ahead without planning permission, while others say that permission was granted but then revoked. The commonly believed reason is that the ground was found to be unstable, but even this has been called a lie. This building has stood here for over two decades and so far the ground has supported it just fine. 

Construction allegedly stopped in 2008, at which point Andrzej either purchased the place but could do nothing with it, or attempted to sell it but couldn't find a buyer, depending on which version you believe. 

Either way, the result is the same. The building sits in limbo. It can't be completed, nor can it be sold.

There's an old bed frame here which would indicate that someone intended on sleeping here at some point. 

What I was able to ascertain, by looking at actual records and not just listening to the neighbours gossip, is that Andrzej owned an advertising agency. This was established in 2006, and its HQ address is this building, having moved here from elsewhere. As well as putting posters on billboards and making signs for shops, he also handled real estate brokerage and airport transport. 

And it's a bit of a shame that it shut down really, because this place definitely needs more airport transport. My pre-booked ride failed to show up. When I rang them up, they just refunded my money, which was annoying because what I really needed was a ride to the Airbnb. If Andrzej's company hadn't closed down, maybe I could have just used him.

Where were you, Andrzej?

Well depending on who you listen to, he might be dead. 

The next room is also circular, and has this central stairway that I absolutely love.

But we won't be going up there just yet. Instead, I'm heading to the back room, where we have a pretty sexy swimming pool. 

Sexy if you like polio anyway. 

Check out the stairway and these pillars!

It's really interesting because thematically it does deviate from traditional urbex. I often explore abandoned places that have been lived in, with the building offering me a glimpse into their life. 

But while it's usually about lost memories, here it's about lost possibilities. Andrzej didn't get a chance to live here, but that doesn't mean he was without hope and excitement for his project. A lot of effort went into this place, and it was ultimately all wasted. It's a dream that didn't come true. 

That's pretty sad. 

Rather than taking the central stairs in the other room, I'm slipping up the back passage. 

It emerges in this spacious room above the swimming pool. 

Against the one wall is this raised area. Some have suspected that this was intended for bands or DJs, with this room being some kind of function area. It does make sense. That's probably the only logical reason one might have for having something like this. 

But then, we are dealing with an eccentric design here. For all we know, Andrzej wanted a tiered bedroom, so that he could wake up and smile down at his chambermaid. 

There's also a balcony area leading off from it. I assume if it was meant to be a function area, there would need to be a little more in the way of fencing. As it stands, any drunken dispute at a party could be solved simply by shoving someone to their splattery end. 

It's got a nice little view over the town. 

And then there's this really Dapper character scrawled on the wall. I really like it. It's like some little alien pixie thing. It looks like a cryptid from some obscure folklore tale or something. 

Is this something? Am I just being ignorant?

And here we are back at the central stairway. 

In regards to the fate of Andrzej, I have heard conflicting stories. Some say that he's in heaps of debt, and that his business was a huge financial scam. Some say he's dead and his son is fighting a court battle with a company that has claimed legal ownership of this building. 

Others simply say quite ominously "he'll be gone for some time."

As for his character, that also gets mixed reviews. Some say that they worked with him and that he was a good man, and very charitable. Others have countered this by saying that he's hurt many people.

This does bring us to the most interesting rumour, sourced from one of the locals who either seems to know the most about this place or is just loud and confidently wrong, and that is that Andrzej is in jail for murder. 

But I've been unable to verify this. Humans love to gossip, and it could just be bullshit. 

Moving beyond the central room, we have this circular room at the front of the building, above the main entrance room. 

It's pretty cool! I actually love these circular doorways leading onto balconies. It makes me feel like I'm on an alien spaceship, or at least it would if there wasn't rubble strewn everywhere. 

I'll be honest though. Whoever said that this place was going to be a hotel was fucking cooked. 

It's missing a crucial thing that all hotels need: bedrooms. 

So far we've seen six rooms- three downstairs, three upstairs, one being a swimming pool, one being an entry hall and two for the central staircase. This is not a hotel.

It could be a venue, maybe. I could see this place having a bar and a dance floor, especially with that raised stage area. But whoever made up the story of it being a hotel clearly forgot to actually look at it. I'm no detective, but I do know that when you're trying to figure out what something is, looking at it is the first crucial step. 

. 

I could see someone living here, with this room being an awesome bedroom. I could even see this place being a brothel. But it clearly wasn't meant to be a hotel. 

The balconies are pretty cool, leading from one doorway to another. They're more like external corridors than balconies. 

Over here we have an elevator. 

It's cool, but even this is far too small to be a hotel elevator. They tend to be a bit more spacious, so that two or more people can enter and still be able to breathe. 

So, aside from the allegations that Andrzej murdered someone, there is also another murder associated with this house. This is actually verifiable, with quite a lot of news coverage.

But there is some debate as to whether it happened in this specific house. The news just says that some teenagers were partying in an abandoned house in the area, and this just so happens to be the one everyone thinks about, because it's the most well-known one, what with sticking out like a black kid at a Hitler youth rally. But a quick browse on Google Maps revealed two more derelict houses in walking distance of this place, both looking disappointingly generic. 

What I will say is, given that the crime amassed this much publicity, surely the building it happened in wouldn't remain wide open for anyone to walk into. If you rewind streetview back to 2017, when the murder took place, the only real change is less graffiti. Surely there would be flowers for the victim, or at least police tape.

Regardless, according to the news, in 2017 some teenagers were having a party for a girls birthday. Among them was a kid called Jacek, who was sixteen. Jacek had a thing for a girl, and she happened to be dating a nineteen-year-old called Dominik. 

(Jacek. Photo not mine, obviously.)

Allegedly he had been getting quite lippy with Dominik, and Dominik eventually snapped. While Jacek was at this party, there was a phone conversation with Dominik, who announced that he was coming there with a knife. 

It turns out that announcing your intentions to come to a party to harm someone with a knife is a pretty silly move, because he had a bottle smashed over his head the second he entered the building. 

Dominik then retaliated by plunging his knife into Jacek's chest, to a depth of about 24cm.

There's two versions of what happened next. One news story tells of how Dominik carried Jacek out onto the street, and would later tell the courts that  he did it so that the paramedics could access him easier. The other version says that Dominik and all the other partygoers fled, and Jacek stumbled out onto the street before collapsing. 

(Dominik. Photo not mine, obviously)

Dominik originally got ten years, but an appeal extended it to fourteen. The main defence was that his attack was provoked, and that he had acted in self defence after getting bottled. But the courts also heard a recording of their phone conversation, which proved that the stabbing was premeditated. He'd also threatened to stab any of his friends who tried to stop him. He was screwed.

The lesson here is that if you like a girl, don't annoy her boyfriend to the point that he wants to stab you. That won't win her over.

And also, don't be a Dominik. If your relationship is so rickety that you have to chase off competition with a knife, then she's probably not the one. 

But I shouldn't talk so flippantly really. These are still just kids. We've all done stupid things when we were younger. Granted, I've somehow managed to avoid stabbing someone at the behest of my testosterone overlords. But it's their families that I feel sorry for. Nobody wants to have their sixteen year old boy stabbed to death, and nobody wants to wake up one day to the news that their child has murdered someone. It's a really shit situation, and nobody has won. 

Onto the attic!

It's pretty bland up here, and also incredibly dangerous. I'd trust the McCanns to babysit more than I trust the floor to hold my weight. 

Here we have the elevators. 

Very little of the attic is actually sheltered. Most of the roof has either collapsed or been stolen. It's a bit of a death trap and there's not really anything worth seeing. 

There's a bit of graffiti over there, but also a big chasm of missing floorboards. I probably could cross it, but I don't really see the point. I can see the graffiti from here. 

The view is quite nice though. 

In the front yard is this rather sorry-looking caravan. According to streetview, it wasn't there in 2011. It first showed up in the 2017, already trashed. Did someone flytip an entire caravan?

 The house is on a pretty steep hill, so it's possible to park on the yard, and also park in the garage under it, but what's really cool is that there's a staircase in the yard leading down into the garage. 

It kinda gives me superhero vibes. If the owner didn't have a Batmobile, I'll be very disappointed. 

Apparently there was someone living in the garage for a bit, keeping an eye on the villa, but he allegedly killed himself. And just like every story about this building, there are people who say that it is a big fat lie. Some say there was never anyone here keeping an eye on the place. The building has been widely accessible by everyone since 2008. The graffiti and wreckage certainly supports that. 

But check it out! Even on the street-facing side, the garage is on two levels. 

I love this place. It's quirky, it's different, and it's popped my Polish urbex cherry. This is the first of many more to come. 

But I'm going to drag it out a bit on the blog. It's been a while since I gave any love to my local blog, and I have some places near me that need my attention. 

This villa is perfect for urbex beginners. It's wide open, relatively sturdy, and nobody will give a rats kidney that you're in there. Even while I was there some guy was smoking the devils lettuce on a balcony, and as I was leaving, two urbexers showed up and we had a bit of a casual chat. It sure is weird that nobody can agree on the history, but that uncertainty kinda gives it a sense of mystery that makes up for there not being much to look at. 

Poland is looking good so far, and I can assure you it only gets better and wackier from here. 

So to make sure you stay updated on the blog, and to make me feel a little bit richer with the modern equivalent of monopoly money, follow my social media pages! I'm on Facebook, which has recently told me is extending my reach for being a good boy, and I'm on Instagram, where I could dig up the Queen and do a shit on her face, and nobody would notice. I'm on Twitter too, and I don't know why.

In contrast to these algorithmic hellscapes, I'm also on Bluesky, Cara and Vero, platforms where you actually see the posts from people that you want to follow, not just the ones who are raking in the dosh for some algorithm. We need more of that. Maybe check them out.

Anyway, that's all from me.

Thanks for reading!

St Tecwyn's church

While my sister was over from America, we had a quick mooch around this lovely little chapel. It might be a bit of an anomaly on this blog though. It's not exactly abandoned or derelict. Largely disused, perhaps, but still cared for. But because I largely suck at conformity, even to myself, I'm going to blog about it anyway. If you came here for urbex, my last blog was about a pretty awesome war-era bomb shelter, and there's nothing stopping you from clicking on it.

But I love other obscure stuff too, and the line between urbex and the non-urbex-but-obscure has been blurry before. Don't worry, this is a renegade tourism blog. I'll never blog about a place with an admission fee. My adventures here will never have me herded through a maze of velvet rope barriers and exiting via the gift shop. I maintain that one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that the only meaningful form of recreation costs us money. It doesn't. Go out and do something that makes you happy. After you've read this blog, of course. 

The cool thing about this church is that it's pretty isolated. We're on top of a great big hill overlooking an estuary, and it's really peaceful. It's the sort of place one could trek to and encounter minimal humans. I'm a big fan of encountering minimal humans. 

The church was founded by St Tecwyn at some point in the 6th Century. Tecwyn travelled from Brittany (or Armorica at the time) to Wales. While Welsh and Breton are pretty different languages, they do share a common ancestor, so back in the 6th Century they were probably a little more mutually intelligible than they are today. And that's quite fortuitous because Tecwyn came here to confabulate, and he came with about thirteen buddies, including his brothers Tanwg and Twrog, and their father's friend Cadfan. Their goal was to promote Christianity in Wales, and they'd all end up sanctified. 

Perhaps appropriate for organised religion, the only image I can find of Tecwyn shows him approaching Wales on a petri dish. 

(photo not mine)

Initially when he came to the site of this church, there was a big druidic boulder here that had been used for Pagan worship. And like many Christians did with Pagan sites at the time, Tecwyn adopted this spot for his own purposes. 

Once Tecwyn began preaching here, people gathered and it slowly became a thriving little community. The first church here was recorded in 1291 but it was replaced with this one in 1879.  Despite this, remnants of the predecessor do remain. 

This memorial from 1706 was left over from the previous church and just attached to the wall here.

The church interior is really cute. There's nothing much that makes it stand out, but it is very peaceful, and the rows of benches are a bit more comfortable than the standard pew. Not that we've set the bar particularly high there. 

The whole absorption of a former Pagan site was actually pretty common among the early Christians. Rather than outright stamp out a rival religion, there was some degree of integration. Plenty of Christian churches are built on old Pagan sites as strategic efforts to facilitate conversion and not piss off the locals by eradicating their ways. They still had their place of worship. It was just a bit more Jesusy now.

 We also see this in the appropriation of Pagan holidays. It's this sort of thing that makes it impossible for me, as someone interested in history, to take people seriously if they take Christianity literally. For the first few hundred years, Christians didn't even celebrate birthdays. Birthdays were a Pagan thing. Then all of a sudden, after centuries of not bothering, they decided that they knew when Jesus was born, and it just so happened to be on the winter solstice. How convenient. 

This basin is largely thought to be a surviving medieval feature, incorporated into the new church from the old, and it is pretty awesome. Just think how many people have seen and used this since the 1200s. 

Having spoken about St Tecwyn and his opulent entourage, it would be remiss of me to not talk about some other aspects of this period in Welsh history that I find pretty interesting. A whole plethora of Welsh locations have names that originate from this point in time. If you've spent any time in Wales you've probably seen or heard of a place that starts with Llan. Llan means Parish, and the rest of the location's name is usually some mutation of a saints name. So to name a couple near me, Llanfyllin evolved from the parish of St Myllin, and Llangedwyn is the parish of St Cedwyn. In the case of Tecwyn, we have Llandecwyn. 

The whole concept of saints originated in the Roman times. The Romans outlawed and persecuted Christians, and a lot of them were killed. But as Christianity became more accepted, those who were killed became venerated as martyrs, and eventually sanctified. The original Christian hipsters, who were doing it before it was cool, became saints. This concept exploded across Europe and often their bones were considered holy relics. Holy relics became motivation for pilgrimages, so many churches across Europe would claim to have them. In the later medieval period, there was actually a black market of fake saint remains and religious relics. If you wanted Jesus's foreskin, then good news, you could find ten of them. 

I'm not fucking joking!

When the Romans fucked off out of Britain, Emperor Honorius said "see to your own defences," and that was that. The Romans were gone. For the next few hundred years, the Christians of Britain had no direct contact with Rome, and consequently their rituals and ideas began to change. When it came to pilgrimages the average 6th Century peasant couldn't really travel to Jerusalem or Rome, so they needed closer holy sites. 

And the best way to get a closer holy site was with a local saint. 

So places in Wales that start with Llan are literally just places where some bloke set up a church. He may well have been a hermit. Hermit saints were all the rage. 

These saints probably had some pretty interesting things to say, too. This wasn't the modern Christianity, with grumpy people using Gods name for their own hateful agenda. It was often just some guy, living in a stack of rocks somewhere, that people liked to listen to. These saints pretty much just spread the message of hope, salvation and community, and it was a big hit with the poorer folks. I'm a huge fan of that. Religion should be used to comfort, not persecute. 

Quite bizarrely there's some really interesting legends attached to some of these saints. Some of them had random super powers, like talking to animals or seeing the future, and surviving decapitation. Tecwyn's brother Twrog is said to have consumed some "sacred mushrooms," and then hurled a boulder from a mountain to crush a Pagan altar, and it's said that his hand prints are still on that boulder to this day. There's your pilgrimage relic, and your biblical vindication of drug use. 

There's a sign here telling about the churches resident bat colony, which is pretty cool. It points out that churches are actually really common roosting spots for bats, and that this is a good thing despite their poop being the bane of the cleaners existence.  

I absolutely love bats, but unfortunately I didn't see any.

Quite intriguingly, despite the fact that it's impossible to travel anywhere in Wales without seeing a sign for "Llan-something," there are actually only two Welsh saints who are officially recognised by the Catholic church. That's Saint David and Saint Winifred. Consider that in comparison to how many Llans there are, and it really does highlight how detached the Welsh Christians were after the departure of the Romans. The "cult of saints" just exploded over here, and the Pope just decided that none of it was canon.

In regards to the upkeep of the churchyard, these two are doing a stellar job keeping the grass short. 

Despite its relative solitude today, St Tecwyn's church was a popular pilgrimage spot back in the day. A nearby house was actually used as an inn. In the modern era, the view from up here was used for the Windows 10 Snowdonia start up image, but I didn't find that out until after, so I didn't take a comparison shot. Shame on me!

That's about all I've got. St Tecwyn's Church is well worth a mooch if you like cute disused churches. It's probably not going to be on everyone's urbex to-do list, but I liked it. It's just very peaceful up here. There are hundreds of spots in Wales that are just as tranquil, where one can leave the humans to their drama and flappage down below, and just forget the world. That's why Wales is so cool. 

My next blog will be some urbex in another new country, and I am very excited to sink my teeth into that. 

But if you like my blogs and want to stay updated, then the best way is to follow me on social media. It's a very depressing thing to say, and I don't know how we got to this point as a society. Facebook has recently told me that it's extended my reach because I've been a good boy, which kinda sums up everything that's wrong with social media really. Heaven forbid someone actually sees the output of someone they have willingly chosen to follow. Not all of us are trying to be "influencers." Some of us do just want to do fun things, post about it, and have it be seen by people who want to see it, like the days of the old internet.

If you miss those days, then follow me on the likes of Bluesky, Cara and Vero, social media platforms that aren't algorithmic hellscapes. If you want to stay put and gamble then I have the big shitty three, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. My reach on Instagram is pretty much non-existent now so as far as getting blog updates go, it's definitely "hard mode." Try it if you like a challenge.

Thanks for reading!