Poland's amber coast — Hanseatic grandeur, the Solidarity shipyards, and Baltic mead
Gdańsk is the jewel of Poland's Baltic coast — a Hanseatic port city whose colourful Dutch-Flemish merchant houses along Długi Targ (Long Market) were meticulously reconstructed after WWII destroyed 90% of the city, resulting in one of the most cinematic civic spaces in Northern Europe. The city is also the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union movement, whose 1980 strikes at the Lenin Shipyard directly precipitated the collapse of Soviet communism across Eastern Europe. The food combines Baltic seafood (smoked eel, Baltic sprat, herrings marinated in every imaginable way) with Polish clas…
Gdańsk (Danzig in German) was one of the most important trading cities of the Hanseatic League from the 14th century, controlling Baltic grain trade and importing luxury goods from England, Flanders, and the Mediterranean. The city was effectively independent for much of its history and had a mixed German, Polish, Jewish, and Dutch population; Prussia annexed it in 1793, returning it to Poland in 1919 as a Free City under League of Nations mandate. The Nazi invasion of Poland began here on September 1, 1939, when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelled the Polish garrison at Westerpl…