Gdansk, Poland: Instant love affair

August 27, 2015

Gdansk - why did nobody tell me it was so beautiful?

I HAVE fallen in love with Gdansk. We had a lightning affair and I'm betrothed. Why did nobody tell me before how pretty it is?

And how studded with history. It's where both the second world war and the fall of communism began. And more than that, you gaze at the beautiful, intricate buildings and squares... and forget that little of what you see is older than 1950. It was rubble at the end of the war. The Poles rebuilt it, brick by brick.

If you don't know the name Gdansk then Danzig may be more familiar. That's the German name. Poland had vanished in 1795, gobbled by greater empires, in turn defeated in the first world war. It was reborn when peace came. But the Germans pointed out that most people who lived in Danzig spoke German. So the frock-coat brigade in Versailles made Danzig and the surrounding countryside a Free City, in neither one country nor the other.

Years passed and the Germans rightly suspected the Polish minority was up to something that probably wasn't going to be good for the German-speakers. On September 1, 1939, German warships sailed to Danzig and the Poles opened fire. It was just before five in the morning and the second world war had started. By its end, little was left of Danzig but smoke and dust.

That's what makes it so extraordinary to see today.

Fahrenheit's house, a street back from the main promenade

I walked the wide boulevards and stopped in cafés and strolled along the river on which I'd arrived by ferry yesterday. I found where Daniel Fahrenheit grew up before moving around Europe with his merchant family and devising the wacky thermometer scale that carries his name.

To its praise, it was the first way of measuring heat the world had known. To its discredit, it put freezing and boiling at eccentric points on the scale, so that by the 1970s the handful of countries still using it switched for the most part to centigrade, now known as Celsius (because centrigrade doesn't make sense in a lot of languages).

Only the USA, I think, still thinks in Fahrenheit, bless it.

Danzig, long since known as Gdansk, was also where communism faltered in western Europe. The Lenin shipyards are on the edge of the city, divided from the beauty of the centre by simple, workmen's houses. And there, in August 1980, the bosses fired a crane driver called Anna Walentynowicz. She was just short of retirement.

The gate behind which the Solidarity strikers locked themselves is now a monument

Most in the yards would never have heard of her. But, in the way history has, she became the focus for rising complaints about falling standards of living, rising prices and the state of the economy. They called for a strike, to get her back in work. As it happened, a second strike was also being planned, separately, led by activists including an electrician called Lech Wałęsa. He combined them and called for an uprising against the government. The shipbuilders stopped work, locked themselves in and gave the government 21 demands, including the right to democracy and a free press.

The Lenin shipyards eventually became bankrupt and they stand largely forlorn today

Well, you'll have seen the pictures and you'll know the outcome. The gates to the yard have beome a national monument and there's a huge museum and library alongside, designed like a rusting ship, dedicated to history and to social democracy generally.

Poland's most famous electrician signs the accord with communist leaders

Such is the affection in which Pope John-Paul is held that, in the popular mind, it was he who ended the Solidarity strike and brought the end of communism generally

It was as I walked back to the city that I met Laura Scott. She was wheeling her bike out of a hotel and planning to ride back to Gdynia, which is Gdansk's smaller neighbour. From there, she would continue her ride down the old Iron Curtain as far as Istanbul.

Laura, riding the length of the Iron Curtain

She'd still do that, she decided, but why not take a ferry out to Westerplatte first? That, after all, was where the second world war started. And, while we knew there wasn't a lot there to see, a trip through the docks would be fun and it'd be odd to come all this way and miss something so important.

And so we went and we wandered and we had cold drinks and a brush with the most important moment in world history and we came back again. It doesn't sound much but it was a wonderful afternoon in wonderful company.

The bizarre monument where the second world war began

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