Ok, so, I'm going down memory lane with this one...
We visited Gdansk during the summer of 2014, along with the infinite tourists who swarmed Old Town and its splendid port. It was busy, but the Baltic weather was perfect and the kvass, one of my favorite slavic drinks (a fermented beverage made of rye bread), was divine. Doesn’t that sound delish!?
We stayed at Hostel Mamas&Papas for a comfortable rate during our short time in the city; two days to be exact, and definitely not long enough to experience the full sense of its frightful history and modern metropolitan mania. We spent a lot of our time exploring the nooks and crannies of Old Town, its epoch of solidarity, the waterfront situated on river Wisla, and climbing the magnificent 80 meter tower of the St. Mary’s Church, which gives Gdansk its iconic skyline and on which one can traverse the observation platform while gulping in the allure of the horizon yonder.
Gdansk is famous for its mix of architecture, which is due to its incredible history of first Polish, then German, then (again) Polish rule dating as far back as 997. The first written account of the city was by Saint Adalbert, a Czech bishop, in his famous writing Vita Sancti Adalberti, in which he wrote about his visiting the city with the effort to convert the Baltic Prussians to Christianity. Not too long after this very trip, the bishop was martyred for his metaling in sacrilege during another Christian mission because he and his cohorts chopped down sacred oak trees that the old Prussians believed housed their ancestral spirits. But the bishop remained a figure of religious martyrdom and cultural identity for Christian Poles many centuries later, because it was said he wrote the Bogurodzica, the oldest Polish hymn - something that would be sung by Polish forces during a few of the nation's most famous 15th century battles.
True to its mix of architecture, the timeline of change occurring in this city is something composed of several tales, but mostly it was Poland from 997-1308, then it became part of the Teutonic Order, a medieval military order, from 1308-1454 during which the Teutonic Knights killed off the country’s pagan practitioners, then from 1454-1466 spanned the Thirteen Years’ War which was fueled by oppression and the goal of establishing a monarchy ruled by various regional overlords, then it became Poland again in 1466, then Prussia in 1793, then a free city in 1807, then Imperial Germany in 1871, then another free city in 1920, then Nazi Germany in 1939, and finally the territory of Poland that it is today in 1945.
From 1454 to 1929, Polish Jews who truly originated from Gdansk, lived and prospered in the city leading the way in multiple fields of profession, including: print services, grain trades, local government, and merchant guilds. A particular item sold by many merchants of this time and popularized to this day is that of Baltic Gold, or Amber - the petrified resin of ancient trees. This unique gem is produced from forests as old as 40 million years and has been gathered in Gdansk for over 6,000 years, which has greatly contributed to the city’s everlasting affluence. The ancient trading route, the Amber Road, actually connected from Gdansk through the Baltic, through the Alps and onto Rome and beyond for more than a millennia.
Then in 1937, the German pogroms began, killing many of the Gdansk Jews and with about 1000 or so fleeing the city. To this day, there are no original Gdansk Jews who reside in the city. Furthermore, 90 percent of what you see today is a resurrection of architectural preservation and reconstruction, because most of the city was burned and destroyed during WWII from 1939 to 1945.
Although scarred by history, Gdansk remains a Slavic and Baltic treasure that I had so very much longed to visit. Being that it is heavenly accessible by one of Europe’s cheapest airlines, Wizz Air, and about a 2.5 hour flight from Lviv, Ukraine (my former home of four years), I think I'll find myself coming back to this city sometime again and soon. How wonderful is this world we live in anyway where an adventure awaits us at the end of a 2.5 hour international flight!?
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