Poland Guide
The Bay of Gdańsk and the Wisła delta
Gdańsk
To outsiders, Gdańsk was until recently perhaps the most familiar city in Poland. The home of Lech Wałęsa, Solidarity and the former Lenin Shipyards, its images flashed across a decade of news bulletins during the 1980s, and the harbour area fulfills expectations formed from the newsreels, with its harsh industrial landscape. By contrast, the streets of the town centre are lined with tall, narrow merchants' houses dating back to Gdańsk's days as a key member of the Hanseatic League. As the economy grows – with a helping hand from the ever-increasing numbers of tourists visiting the city – many of these historic buildings are being restored and new shops, restaurants and businesses are opening, giving the city a confident, lively feel.
What is surprising is the cultural complexity of the place. Prewar Gdańsk – or Danzig as it then was – was forged by years of Prussian and Hanseatic domination, and the reconstructed city centre looks not unlike Amsterdam, making an elegant backdrop. What has changed entirely, however, is the city's demography. At the outbreak of the last war, nearly all of the 400,000 citizens were German-speaking, with fewer than 16,000 Poles. The postwar years marked a radical shift from all that went before, as the ethnic Germans were expelled and Gdańsk became Polish for the first time since 1308. Germans are returning in numbers now, chiefly as tourists and business people, making an important contribution to the city's rapid emergence as one of Poland's economic powerhouses.
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