Pomerania Region Guide

Pomerania is Poland’s Baltic coast, and its centre is a city where two of the twentieth century’s defining events began.

Gdansk was where the Second World War started, at Westerplatte on 1 September 1939, and where it effectively ended for eastern Europe — the Lenin Shipyard strike of August 1980 produced Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, and the process that unravelled communism across the region nine years later. The European Solidarity Centre tells that story exceptionally well.

The city itself is a rebuilt Hanseatic port of tall merchant houses along the Motlawa, with a crane from 1444 and the largest brick church in the world.

Beyond it: Malbork, the largest castle by land area anywhere, built by the Teutonic Knights; the shifting dunes of the Slowinski coast; and the beaches and pine forests of the Hel peninsula and Kashubia.

Gdansk

The European Solidarity Centre, built beside the shipyard gate where the 1980 strike happened, is among the best museums in Europe and the reason to come. The Museum of the Second World War is equally serious. Then the rebuilt merchant street of Dlugi Targ, the Gothic crane on the Motlawa, and St Mary’s, the largest brick church in the world, with a climb up the tower.

The Tricity

Sopot for the longest wooden pier in Europe and a belle epoque spa town; Gdynia for interwar modernism, built from nothing in the 1920s as Poland’s own port, and the Gdynia Modernism trail.

Malbork

The Teutonic Knights’ headquarters, the largest castle in the world by land area and a UNESCO site — a brick fortress-monastery-palace of enormous scale, an hour by train.

The coast

The Hel peninsula, a sandspit thirty-five kilometres long and at points a few hundred metres wide, with beaches on both sides. Slowinski National Park, where dunes up to forty metres high move several metres a year and bury forest as they go.

Kashubia

Inland lakes, forest and the villages of Poland’s smallest recognised minority language.

Pomerania is a maritime borderland, and its identity has been fought over more than most.

Gdansk, Danzig and in between

The city was Hanseatic and German-speaking for centuries, under Polish crown sovereignty for much of that time, then Prussian, then a Free City between the wars — neither German nor Polish, with its own passports and stamps. The German population was expelled in 1945 and Poles resettled, many from Vilnius. The city has spent the decades since working out how to hold all of that, and now does so with some sophistication: the museums say it plainly and the reconstructed merchant houses are labelled as what they are.

Solidarity

The shipyard strike of August 1980 and the movement that came from it are the region’s proudest possession, and Lech Walesa is a local figure about whom opinions are strong and various.

Kashubians

A West Slavic people with their own language — the only one in Poland with official regional status — their own literature, embroidery and a strong Catholic identity. Around a hundred thousand speak it.

Amber

Gdansk has worked Baltic amber for a thousand years and calls itself the world capital of it, with a guild, a museum and streets of workshops.

The Baltic beaches take an enormous concentration of Polish holidaymakers into eight weeks. Going in June or September rather than July and August makes a real difference to the coast and to the towns that have to absorb it.

The Slowinski dunes are mobile and fragile; stay on the marked routes, which exist because footfall destabilises the sand and the marram that holds it.

The Baltic itself is one of the most polluted seas in the world, shallow, slow to flush and suffering serious eutrophication and summer algal blooms. Choosing operators and accommodation with real environmental practice is worth doing, and so is not adding to the plastic that washes up.

Amber: buy from established Gdansk workshops rather than beach sellers, both for authenticity and because unregulated extraction damages the coast.

At Westerplatte and Stutthof, behave as at any war memorial and former camp. Stutthof in particular is a place where tens of thousands died.

June to August is the coast’s season, and the only time the Baltic is warm enough for most people to swim — around 18 to 20°C in a good year. July and August fill the seaside towns completely.

Late May, June and September are the better months for the cities: long days, warm enough, and without the crush. September in particular is reliable and quiet.

Saint Dominic’s Fair in Gdansk runs for three weeks from late July, a street market going back to 1260 and one of the largest open-air trading events in Europe.

Winter is grey, windy and wet rather than deeply cold, with short days. The cities carry it well — Gdansk’s Christmas market is good — and the coast largely shuts.

4 June and 31 August mark the anniversaries of the 1989 elections and the 1980 Gdansk Agreement, both commemorated here with some intensity.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the region

Sopot is the most expensive seaside town in Poland and can approach western European prices in August; two stops down the commuter line, the same coast costs half as much.