Gdansk
First light saw us making our approach to yet another Baltic Hanseatic town, known for a large part of its history by the German name of Danzig. But it is for the part the city has played in the turbulent history of the twentieth century that Gdansk – to use its Polish appellation - is celebrated. We docked just downstream of the Westerplatte monument that commemorates the site of the first exchange of fire in the Second World War when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein began shelling a Polish garrison whose 182 men held out heroically for seven days before surrendering to the vastly superior force. There followed over five years of conflict in Europe and beyond, ostensibly to liberate Poland, but when the war ended the Poles found themselves under a Soviet occupation that was to last nearly half a century. Yet it was in the Lenin shipyards of Gdansk in the 1980s that an independent trade union achieved official recognition for the first time in the Soviet bloc. The driving force behind that trade union and the libertarian agenda it promoted was a shipyard electrician and devout Roman Catholic, Lech Walesa who became the country’s first president after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a proud recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. We were honored to have President Walesa visit the National Geographic Explorer shortly after breakfast, an original and forceful speaker, whose legendary energy appear undimmed by advancing years.
For the reminder of the morning we rode into town, passing the Solidarity Monument to the Fallen at the gates of the shipyards and on into the old town, lovingly reconstructed from the post-war ruins. It did not take long in the old town to realize that we were back with the Hansa. Reputedly the largest brick-built church in the world, St Mary’s is able to accommodate 25,000 worshippers and contains a huge astronomical clock from the fifteenth century. Also from the fifteenth century is the Gdansk Crane, a double-towered gate on the waterfront with a crane mechanism used to raise masts and position them on the characteristic Hanseatic vessels, the cogs. Afternoon options included the town’s fine Maritime Museum, the Archaeological Museum and photography walks. Before dinner, back on board, we were treated to a fine selection of Polish cold cuts from the local market, before venturing out of the harbour once more into a boisterous Baltic Sea.
