Gdańsk was for centuries the largest port of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a Hanseatic city with almost complete autonomy, populated by Germans, Poles and Dutch. On 1 September 1939 at 4.45 the battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Westerplatte peninsula here, beginning the Second World War. In 1945 the city was flattened and was rebuilt in an approximation of its seventeenth-century form.
The main town
The Long Market and Długa street form the Royal Way between the Highland Gate and the Green Gate. The houses are narrow and tall because tax was assessed on facade width, with raised terraces in front of the doors. St Mary's Basilica is the largest brick church in the world, holds 25,000 people, and from its tower the whole Vistula delta is visible. The Crane on the Motława, a fifteenth-century port crane powered by men walking inside treadwheels, lifted four tonnes.
Solidarity
In August 1980 a strike at the Lenin Shipyard led to the August Agreements and the first independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc. The European Solidarity Centre, in a rust-coloured steel building at the shipyard gate, tells that story through to 1989. The Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers stands beside it.
Amber
The Baltic coast supplies around 90 percent of the world's amber and Gdańsk has worked it since the Middle Ages. The Amber Museum occupies the Great Mill and Mariacka Street is lined with workshops. Ask for certification when buying; resin imitations are common.
Sopot and Gdynia
The Tricity runs 30 km along the bay. Sopot has the longest wooden pier in Europe at 511 metres and a belle époque spa town behind it. Gdynia was built from nothing after 1926 as a port for the reborn Polish state and is one of the better modernist ensembles in Europe.
The Free City
Between 1920 and 1939 Gdańsk was a Free City under League of Nations supervision, with its own currency, stamps and parliament, but neither independent nor part of Poland or Germany. That arrangement, devised at Versailles as a compromise, became one of the triggers of the war.
Practicalities
The SKM commuter train links the Tricity every few minutes. The airport handles European flights and the train from Warsaw takes under three hours. Beach season runs June to August and the Baltic rarely exceeds 20 degrees.