[1] It also lies within the larger Katowice-Ostrava metropolitan area which has a population of about 5.3 million people and spans across most of eastern Upper Silesia, western Lesser Poland and the Moravian-Silesian Region in the Czech Republic.

[4] The name of the city is derived from the Slavic root gliw or gliv, suggesting terrain characterized by loam or wetland.

Because of the vast expenses incurred by the Habsburg monarchy during their 16th century wars against the Ottoman Empire, Gleiwitz was leased to Friedrich Zettritz for the amount of 14,000 thalers.

[5] In the 17th and 18th century, the city's economy switched from trading and brewing beer to clothmaking, which collapsed after the 18th-century Silesian Wars.

[5] During the mid 18th century Silesian Wars, Gleiwitz was taken from the Habsburg monarchy by the Kingdom of Prussia along with the majority of Silesia.

[citation needed] The first coke-fired blast furnace on the European continent was constructed in Gleiwitz in 1796 under the direction of John Baildon.

Other features of the 19th-century era industrialized Gleiwitz were a gasworks, a furnace factory, a beer bottling company, and a plant for asphalt and paste.

By 1911, it had two Protestant and four Roman Catholic churches, a synagogue, a mining school, a convent, a hospital, two orphanages, and a barracks.

[citation needed] After the end of World War I, clashes between Poles and Germans occurred during the Polish insurrections in Silesia.

[9] Seeking a peaceful solution to the conflict, the League of Nations held a plebiscite on 20 March 1921 to determine which country the city should belong to.

[9] On 9 April 1922, 17 Frenchmen died in an explosion during the liquidation of a German militia weapons warehouse in the present-day Sośnica district.

[10] On 9 June 1933, Gliwice was the site of the first conference of the Nazi anti-Polish organization Bund Deutscher Osten in Upper Silesia.

[11] In a secret Sicherheitsdienst report from 1934, Gliwice was named one of the main centers of the Polish movement in western Upper Silesia.

[13] The Gleiwitz incident was a false-flag attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz on 31 August 1939, staged by the German secret police, which served as a pretext, devised by Reinhard Heydrich under orders from Hitler, for Nazi Germany to invade Poland, and which marked the start of the Second World War.

[25] In October 1943, the Germans brought a large transport of Italian POWs to a forced labour camp in today's Łabędy district.

[27] In the largest subcamp, whose prisoners were mainly Poles, Jews and Russians, nearly 100 either died of hunger, mistreatment and exhaustion or were murdered.

[citation needed] In 1945, with the approaching Red Army, a significant number of residents were either evacuated or fled the city at their own discretion.

Following the Yalta Conference, Gliwice, along most of Silesia, was incorporated into communist Poland, and the remaining German population was expelled.

[citation needed] Ethnic Poles, some of them themselves expelled from the Polish Kresy (which were incorporated into Soviet Union), started to settle down in Gliwice.

[36] Except for a short period immediately after Reformation, Gliwice has always had a Catholic majority, with sizeable Protestant and Jewish minorities.

According to the Catholic Church in Poland, weekly mass attendance in the Diocese of Gliwice is at 36.7 percent of obliged, on par with Polish average.

Gliwice is also the seat of one of the three Armenian Church parishes in Poland (the other being in Warsaw and Gdańsk), which is subject to the Holy See directly.

[40] Only 25 Jews from Gliwice's pre-war Jewish population survived World War II in the city, all of them being in mixed marriages with gentiles.

[43] Immediately after the war, Gliwice became a congregation point for Jews who had survived the Holocaust, with the Jewish population standing at around a 1,000 people in 1945.

Since then, the number of Jews in Gliwice has declined as survivors moved to larger cities or emigrated to Israel, the United States, and other western countries.

The Gliwice Canal (Kanał Gliwicki) links the harbour to the Oder River and thus to the waterway network across much of Germany and to the Baltic Sea.

They include, in alphabetical order: Bojków, Brzezinka, Czechowice, Kopernik, Ligota Zabrska, Łabędy, Obrońców Pokoju, Ostropa, Politechnika, Sikornik, Sośnica, Stare Gliwice, Szobiszowice, Śródmieście, Żwirki I Wigury, Trynek, Wilcze Gardło, Wojska Polskiego, Wójtowa Wieś, Zatorze, Żerniki.