A gadabout in Gdansk

I spent a few days in northern Poland between Christmas and New Year. I don’t have time to write it up properly thanks to a flurry of podcast recording and work on a new book, but I want to give you a few brief impressions. Perhaps it will inspire a trip of your own.

I blew a big chunk of my savings on a series of long flights in November, so travel options were limited. All the more reason to stay close to home. I chose Gdansk because I’ve wanted to see nearby Malbork Castle for years, and because of its turbulent place at the heart of twentieth century Europe. 

I stuffed a few clothes and a book into my favourite light backpack — a 38-litre Osprey Kestrel — and we made our early morning way to Berlin Hauptbanhoff to catch the Warsaw Express.

We arrived in early evening, and I liked the place immediately. Gdansk is the perfect size to be walkable, with a complex history — including periods of Polish, German and self-rule — written in stone in its beautifully restored old town buildings.

The city’s era of German settlement began in 1308 when it was captured by Brandenburg and the bloodthirsty Teutonic Knights moved in. Unlike other heavily armed religious orders that attempted to recapture the Holy Land from Islam, these German knights hacked and burned their way across Europe’s northern periphery, spreading the Gospel and seizing land in the name of the faith, prefaced with a choice of baptism or the sword.

Town planning spread alongside Christianity when the knights expanded their brick and stone castles into orderly settlements, flooding the lands of peasant farmers with German immigrants and subjugating the Poles whose territory they seized.

Gdansk joined the Hanseatic League in 1361, forming trading relations with Bruges, Novgorod, Lisbon and Seville. As Poland’s principal seaport, it was also an important shipbuilding centre, an industry that still thrives there today.

The power of the Teutonic Knights was finally broken in 1410 at the Battle of Grunwald and Gdansk became Polish again, but it didn’t last long. the story is a complicated one, and we don’t have time to tell it all here. In short, the city became part of Prussia (as Danzig, in German), and then part of the German Empire after the unification of Germany in 1871. 

It had a brief period of independence after World War One when Danzig was a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations, but Hitler took it back when he invaded Poland in 1939 and started World War Two. 

When that war ended, the region was reshaped by shifting borders, the postwar expulsion of Germans from the former East Prussia, and newly arriving Poles.

Gdansk captured the attention of the world once more in the 1980s, when a strike in the shipyards sparked the rise of the Solidarity movement — the first push that eventually toppled the Eastern Bloc, the Warsaw Pact and the Berlin Wall. You can learn more about these events by visiting the European Solidarity Centre.

You might also consider visiting the excellent Emigration Museum in nearby Gdynia, half an hour away by train, for an overview of recent Polish history. It left me with a deep sense of empathy for a people who have endured so much misery and held on to their culture despite the Teutonic Knights, Prussians, Nazis and Soviets.

That’s a short overview of a very complicated story. I encourage you to read more — or better yet, to go there and see it for yourself.

Gdansk is further north than Berlin, so it was dark and grey most of the time in December. Cold Baltic winds cut through the streets, sending us scurrying for hot mulled wine stalls and rose-filled pączki (Polish donuts) fresh from the oven at Dobra Pączkarnia. They were some of the best donuts I’ve ever eaten, even better than Tim’s when each Tim’s used to bake their own. 

A lingering atmosphere of Christmas cheer still infected the old town, adding warmth to the winter darkness.

I was last in Poland in 2016 (Krakow and that area) and it seemed like a country on the rise. I felt it even more strongly this time. The streets were clean, not a sign of litter anywhere, and the trains ran on time, departing to the minute on schedule. People looked prosperous, cultured and hard working.

The crew of the Berlin <=> Warsaw Express changes when it crosses the border. In Poland, everything was on time. The moment we entered Germany on the way home and they made the switch, we went from being on time to 15 minutes late. There was graffiti everywhere, and open spaces were strewn with litter. The change precisely at the border was surprising, and the opposite of what outsiders would expect when imagining the EU’s economic powerhouse.

I returned to Berlin with the impression that prosperity in Europe is shifting east. Countries like Poland and the Czech Republic are rising economically, confident of their culture and suffused with optimism, even as Germany, France and the UK are stagnating under flailing governments, gripped by self-doubt and a sort of cultural self-flagellation made worse by economic decline that shows no sign of turning around.

I hope I’ll have more opportunities to hop over to Poland before my time in Berlin is at an end.

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