Gdansk: The Hanseatic Port Where Solidarity Was Born

Gdansk was the great Baltic port of Poland, one of the richest cities of the Hanseatic trading world, and it is also where a shipyard strike helped bring down communism across half a continent. Read the city as two connected stories and it comes clear: down on the Motlawa River, trade built a merchant showpiece where Polish kings, German-speaking merchants, and Dutch-trained builders all left their mark; a short walk north, at a shipyard gate, workers refused to go home in August 1980 and gave birth to Solidarity. Walk the Hanseatic Main Town and the birthplace of a movement, and you read the whole arc of Gdansk at your own pace.

The port that made a merchant city rich

For centuries Gdansk was the richest port on the Baltic and one of the wealthiest cities of the Hanseatic world. Its Main Town was built as a stage set of that prosperity, and the ceremonial spine that runs through it is the Royal Way, the route by which Polish kings once rode into the city. The Main Town: The Royal Way of the Hanseatic City walk follows that spine from the landward gates down to the river, about one and a half kilometres of gables, bronze, and brick.

The route opens with two gates. The Upland Gate, the Brama Wyzynna, was built in 1574 and 1575 and carried the world outside into the fortified merchant town. A few steps east stands the Golden Gate, the Zlota Brama, built between 1612 and 1614 to a design by Abraham van den Blocke in an elegant Dutch Mannerist style. Above it, added in 1647 and 1648, stand eight allegorical figures that face two directions on purpose: Peace, Freedom, Wealth, and Fame look outward, while Concord, Justice, Piety, and Prudence face the citizens walking into town.

Past the gates runs Long Street, the Ulica Dluga, roughly 320 metres of tall, narrow houses standing shoulder to shoulder, each crowned with ornamented gables that step and curl against the sky. These were the homes of the Hanseatic burghers, the merchant families who made their fortunes from the Baltic trade in grain, timber, amber, and salt. A house here was a public statement of standing, and the competition between neighbours is written across the frontages in stone reliefs and carved portals. Long Street was recognized as a Historic Monument of Poland on the eighth of September 1994.

Where Long Street opens into the Long Market, the Main Town Hall rises to about 83 metres, the second-tallest structure in the whole Main Town. Its construction began in 1346, and since 1561 a gilded figure of King Sigismund Augustus has crowned the tower as a weathervane, so the town hall of this proud merchant city is literally topped with a golden king. Just beyond, on the Long Market, stands the emblem of Gdansk itself: Neptune's Fountain, the Fontanna Neptuna. The bronze sea god was designed by Abraham van den Blocke and cast around 1615. Work had begun in 1606, but delays including a war with Sweden and the death of the designer meant the fountain was not officially opened until the ninth of October 1633. A bronze god of the sea presiding over the merchants' square says exactly what this city was.

Behind Neptune stands Artus Court, the Dwor Artusa, the grand meeting hall of the city's merchants, named for the legend of King Arthur and his knights. Similar Arthurian courts existed in other Hanseatic cities, where merchants liked to imagine themselves as a brotherhood of equals around a round table. The Long Market closes at the water with the Green Gate, the Zielona Brama, built between 1564 and 1568. It was raised to serve as a formal residence for visiting Polish monarchs, and yet, as the record plainly tells us, no king ever actually stayed there.

Brick, amber, and the machinery of trade

The Waterfront: The Crane, the Shipyards, and Solidarity walk begins where the last one ended, at the Green Gate and the Motlawa quay, then reads the river as the city itself did, as a road paved with water. Behind the gate runs the Long Bridge waterfront, the Dlugie Pobrzeze, which sounds decorative but was the working quay of the port. From the fourteenth century, wooden loading platforms passed cargo to and from ships, merging into one continuous embankment by the seventeenth century.

The great survivor of that working port is the Crane, the Zuraw. After a fire, the structure you see was built between 1442 and 1444, and in its day it was the largest port crane in medieval Europe. The detail that stays with you is how it worked: men climbed inside great wooden treadwheels and walked, the way a hamster turns a wheel, turning a shaft that could lift up to about two tons. It loaded cargo and stepped the masts of ships. The whole structure stands about 30 metres high and is the only surviving twin-tower gate in the city. Destroyed in 1945, it was restored between 1956 and 1959 and reopened after renovation in the spring of 2024.

Nearby, Mariacka Street, the Ulica Mariacka, is often called the most beautiful street in Gdansk. Its houses front onto raised stone terraces called przedproza, edged with ironwork and carved stone rain-spouts shaped like gargoyles that locals nickname Rzygacze, the spewers, because they spit rainwater over the street in a downpour. This was long the street of goldsmiths and amber craftsmen, and it is still nicknamed the Amber Street. At its head rises St Mary's, the Bazylika Mariacka, a colossal work of Brick Gothic built between 1379 and 1502. It is one of the three largest brick churches in the world, alongside San Petronio in Bologna and the Frauenkirche in Munich, running about 105 metres in length. Across the water lies Granary Island, the Wyspa Spichrzow, where at its peak about 300 granaries stored the grain that Poland's harvests floated down the Vistula. This modest patch of ground was the engine room of the city's wealth.

The gate where freedom began

Almost everything on these walks carries the same wound. In the Red Army's assault on the city in March 1945, the Main Town was nearly obliterated. St Mary's lost its wooden roof to fire and fourteen of its great vaults collapsed; it was reconsecrated on the seventeenth of November 1955. Long Street, Neptune, the Crane, the granaries: all were flattened or damaged and patiently raised again, gable by gable, both authentically old and lovingly rebuilt.

Then the waterfront walk turns north, out of the mercantile old town and into the industrial city, to the historic Gdansk Shipyard, once known as the Lenin Shipyard, founded in 1946. In front of Gate Number Two, the Brama nr 2, a strike broke out in August 1980, led by an electrician named Lech Walesa. Out of it came Solidarnosc, Solidarity, the first free, mass, independent trade union anywhere in the Soviet bloc, a movement eventually joined by around ten million Poles. The strike was settled by the August 1980 Gdansk Agreement, negotiated between the workers and the communist state. This was an ordinary industrial gate until a group of workers stood behind it and refused to go home.

Just outside the gate, on Solidarity Square, three enormous steel crosses rise together, each 42 metres high and weighing about 36 tonnes. The Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970 was unveiled on the sixteenth of December 1980, its construction one of the conditions the workers won in the Gdansk Agreement, and it is described as the first monument to victims of communist oppression ever erected in a communist country. It remembers workers killed when the state put down the coastal protests of December 1970.

Beside the monument stands the European Solidarity Centre, the Europejskie Centrum Solidarnosci, which opened on the thirty-first of August 2014 with Lech Walesa present. Its walls are made of weathering steel designed to evoke the hulls of the ships built at this shipyard. By the Centre's own account, Poland's bloodless transition of 1989 helped bring down the Berlin Wall and the dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe. Down at the river, trade. Up here, freedom. To plan your visit across both threads, start with the full list of Gdansk walking tours and take each at the pace that suits you.

Sources

• Museum of Gdansk (Muzeum Gdanska), official pages on the Main Town Hall, Artus Court, and the Uphagen House
• National Maritime Museum in Gdansk, official information on the Crane (Zuraw)
• European Solidarity Centre (Europejskie Centrum Solidarnosci), official history of the August 1980 strike and the Gdansk Agreement
• St Mary's Basilica in Gdansk (Bazylika Mariacka), parish and heritage information on the church's construction and post-war reconstruction
• Poland's register of Historic Monuments (Pomnik Historii), listing for Gdansk's Main Town