🇵🇱 Poland · Pomerania and the Baltic coast
Gdańsk is one of the most fascinating and history-laden cities in all of Poland. An old and immensely rich Hanseatic port on the Baltic, it dazzles with its Royal Way of tall, narrow façades painted in a thousand colours, its monumental gates, its enormous brick basilica and its riverfront presided over by the largest medieval crane in the Europe of its day. Like Warsaw, Gdańsk was flattened in the Second World War and lovingly rebuilt, so its historic centre combines the emotion of the old with the story of a rebirth.
But Gdańsk is much more than a Hanseatic postcard: it is a key city for understanding the twentieth century. Here, on the Westerplatte peninsula, the first shots of the Second World War were fired on 1 September 1939. And here, in the Gdańsk shipyards, an electrician named Lech Wałęsa led in 1980 the strike that gave rise to Solidarity (Solidarność), the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc, whose peaceful struggle was decisive for the fall of communism across eastern Europe. Two extraordinary museums tell these stories.
This guide takes you through the essential Gdańsk: how to get around, what to see in the historic centre and along the river Motława, where to buy the famous Baltic amber, how to visit the twentieth-century memorial sites and how to make the most of the nearby beach at Sopot and the imposing Malbork Castle. A maritime, cultured and surprising city, cheaper than the great capitals of western Europe and with an unmistakable character of its own.
Gdańsk began as a settlement on the Baltic more than a thousand years ago and grew as a prosperous Hanseatic League port, trading grain, timber and amber. It was tied to the Teutonic Order and then, from 1466, to the Polish Crown, with broad autonomy and great wealth, as the kingdom's main port. After the partitions it passed to Prussia (as Danzig). In the twentieth century it had a special status as the 'Free City of Danzig'; on its Westerplatte peninsula the Second World War began on 1 September 1939, and the city was almost entirely destroyed. Rebuilt after the war and part of Poland, it took centre stage in history again in 1980, when the Solidarity trade union was born in its shipyards, led by Lech Wałęsa, driving the fall of communism. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Poland's window on the sea: the Malbork of the Teutonic Knights, Hanseatic Gdańsk where the Second World War began at Westerplatte and where Solidarity was born in 1980, and the elegant seaside resort of Sopot with its long wooden pier.
Read the history of Pomerania and the Baltic coast →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The origins of Gdańsk are lost in the early Middle Ages. A settlement by the mouth of the river Motława on the Baltic already existed around the year 997, when — according to tradition — Bishop Adalbert of Prague baptised its inhabitants; that date is taken as the city's symbolic 'millennium'. Set at a strategic point where the great river Vistula flows into the sea, the place was destined for maritime trade.
Over the following centuries, Gdańsk (Danzig in German) grew as a port under the dukes of Pomerania and filled with merchants and craftsmen, many of them German-speaking, drawn by the opportunities of Baltic trade. The town received urban rights and began to prosper.
In 1308 came a bloody and decisive episode: the Teutonic Order — the German military order that dominated the neighbouring lands — took Gdańsk in an action the chronicles describe as a massacre of its inhabitants. From then on the city was under the control of the Teutonic Knights for almost a century and a half. Under their rule, though not without tension, Gdańsk kept growing as a trading centre and joined the powerful Hanseatic League, the network of merchant cities that dominated trade in northern Europe. The foundations of its future greatness were being laid.
The turning point came in the fifteenth century. Fed up with Teutonic rule, the towns and nobility of Prussia rebelled, and Gdańsk sided with the king of Poland. After the long Thirteen Years' War, the Second Treaty of Thorn of 1466 brought Gdańsk and all of Royal Prussia into the Polish Crown. The city kept very broad autonomy — it minted coins and had its own government and army — and, above all, it gained control of trade at the mouth of the Vistula.
That made it Poland's great port and one of the richest and most populous cities in all of central and northern Europe. Through Gdańsk went out to the rest of the continent the grain of the vast Polish plains — the 'granary of Europe' — as well as timber, salt, potash and the prized Baltic amber. In came manufactured goods, cloth, wine and spices. The merchants of Gdańsk amassed colossal fortunes.
That wealth took shape in a splendid heritage: the tall ornate façades of the Royal Way, the monumental St Mary's Basilica (the largest brick church in the world), the Artus Court where the merchants met, the Neptune Fountain, the monumental gates and the great harbour Crane. Gdańsk was also a cultured and relatively tolerant city, open to different religious confessions, and the birthplace of figures such as the scientist Daniel Fahrenheit, inventor of the temperature scale. It was a proud, cosmopolitan and prosperous merchant republic, under the protection of the Polish crown.
Gdańsk's fortunes changed with Poland's decline and the partitions of the late eighteenth century. In 1793, in the second partition, the city was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia and became, under the name Danzig, a German city. Through the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth it formed part of Prussia and then of the German Empire, and its character was Germanised, although it kept a population of Polish origin and its identity as a port.
After the First World War and the German defeat, the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 gave Gdańsk a most peculiar status: in 1920 the 'Free City of Danzig' (Wolne Miasto Gdańsk) was created, a small semi-autonomous state under the protection of the League of Nations, with a mostly German population but with special rights for Poland, which needed an outlet to the sea. This compromise left everyone dissatisfied and turned Danzig into a permanent focus of tension between Germany and Poland during the interwar years.
Hitler's Nazi Germany made the 'Danzig question' — its demand that the city be returned to the Reich — one of the pretexts for aggression against Poland. The claim on Danzig thus became the spark that preceded the greatest conflict in history.
In the early hours of 1 September 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, moored in the port of Gdańsk on the pretext of a courtesy visit, opened fire on the small Polish military garrison at the Military Transit Depot on Westerplatte, a peninsula at the harbour entrance. History considers those shots the beginning of the Second World War, the most devastating conflict of all time. The Westerplatte garrison, with little more than 200 men, held out heroically for seven days against a far superior German attack, becoming a symbol of Polish resistance.
That same day, the Polish defenders of the Danzig Post Office building (the Poczta Polska) put up another desperate resistance; many of those who surrendered were executed afterwards. The city was annexed by Nazi Germany, and its Polish and Jewish population suffered persecution, deportation and death through the years of occupation.
The end of the war brought the almost total destruction of Gdańsk. In 1945, in the fighting as the Soviet Red Army took the city and in the fires and looting that followed, the magnificent historic centre was reduced to rubble: it is estimated that more than 90% of the centre was flattened. The German population fled or was expelled after the war, and Gdańsk, returned to Poland by the postwar agreements, was repopulated with Poles, many of them displaced from the eastern territories lost to the Soviet Union. The city recovered its Polish name, but it lay in ruins.
Like Warsaw, Gdańsk decided to rise from its ruins. Through the postwar decades the historic centre — the Główne Miasto, or 'Main Town' — was carefully rebuilt, recovering the street plan, the façades of the merchant houses, the gates and the great St Mary's Basilica from photographs, plans and documents. Today that rebuilt centre with its colourful façades is once again one of the most beautiful urban ensembles in Poland.
But Gdańsk was destined to change history again. In December 1970, brutal repression of workers' protests in the city left dozens dead. And in August 1980, at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk, a sacked electrician named Lech Wałęsa climbed over the wall and took the lead of a strike that spread like wildfire. Out of that strike came the Gdańsk Agreement and Solidarity (Solidarność), the first free and independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, which came to have millions of members. Despite the martial law imposed in 1981, the movement survived underground and became the main force of peaceful opposition to communism.
Pressure from Solidarity led, in 1989, to the Round Table negotiations and the first semi-free elections, which opened the way to democracy in Poland and triggered the fall of communism across eastern Europe. Lech Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and was president of Poland between 1990 and 1995. Today the European Solidarity Centre, next to the shipyards, tells this story. Contemporary Gdańsk is a prosperous, cultured and proud city: a thriving port, the capital of amber, a first-rate tourist destination and a double symbol of the Polish twentieth century, the place where the war began and where the Iron Curtain began to fall.