Porz

Text in German. No. 105 of the Rhenish City Atlas is dedicated to today’s Cologne district of Porz, which was a small village with a few houses and around 200 residents until the beginning of the 19th century. People lived mainly from agriculture and had to go to the mass in nearby Urbach on Sundays. Porz only played a role as the place of jurisdiction of the Counts of Berg, which was apparently so important that the office was named after the village on the Rhine, although the actual administrative seat of the office was Bensberg. Only with the industrialization, namely with the development of the right bank of the Rhine by the railway from the middle of the 19th century, did the rise of Porz begin. The first industrial companies settled there and the population increased. In 1951, Porz was elevated to the status of a town when it was merged with the surrounding villages, which now have over 30,000 inhabitants. Development was dynamic in the following years as well, so that by 1990 100,000 people were already living here. However, by then Porz had not been independent for a long time. As early as 1975, after considerable resistance, Porz was incorporated into Cologne as district 7.