The eastern city of Bialystok is one of the best cities to live because it is clean, quiet and green, claims a report by Eurobarometer, the EU’s statistical agency.

Citizens of 75 European cities were asked to assess whether their home cities are nice places to live and work in. Three Polish cities - the capital city of Warsaw, the historical city of Krakow and the coastal city of Gdansk - received top marks from their inhabitants. The biggest surprise, however, was the inclusion of the eastern city of Bialystok, which topped the ranking in spite of being usually considered to be poor and underdeveloped.

Eurobarometres shows that citizens of Bialystok appreciate the fact that the city is very clean. Ninety percent of people who live in Bialystok describe their home city as neat and tidy, 75 percent think that there is hardly any air pollution in the city and 67 percent say that the city is quiet and they never complain about noise. Most of the citizens of Bialystok (90 percent) are happy to live in a city abounding with parks and gardens and over 80 percent of the respondents like the streets in Bialystok.

In the Eurobarometer’s report Bialystok was even rated higher by its citizens than the beautiful cities of Paris, Vienna, Lisbon and Oslo.

The report also showed that the citizens of Bialystok are happy with the way public money is spent. “Every day we invest almost two million zloty (500,000 euro) in the city’s development and you can really see the change. In seven years the amount of money spent on public investments increased ten times,” says the mayor of Bialystok Tadeusz Truskolaski. (mg)