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One of the more notable features of Norfolk is the number of large churches built, presumably for lack of any other socially acceptable form of conspicuous consumption, in the middle of what are now tiny villages.
Gdansk is much the same, except that Gdansk is rather smaller than Norfolk so the churches get in each others' way rather more. There's one on roughly every other church corner. They're made of brick - this area doesn't really have the geology for stone - and accordingly are ponderously enormous, with stubby towers since any Lego aficionado knows the difficulties of building delicately soaring spires out of brick. Some of them have delicately soaring spires made out of copper and stuck on top of great solid brick pedestals.
Other than churches, there are the houses of rich Hanseatic merchants, built out of monumental brick and then plastered in blues and greens; some of these have turned into fine tea- and chocolate-shops (until today I was unaware how nice pineapple coated with dark chocolate could be), some into museums, some just sit there being placidly Hanseatic at onlookers.
World War Two started here, and (with Nazi troops holed up on one of the peninsulas) pretty much ended here too, so the old town is, understandably, all relatively new; a 'built MDCLI' sign will have been saved from the rubble and proudly re-gilded and inserted into a building once the reconstruction finished in MCMLXXI. I don't think any church roof survived, though most of the massive brick frontages remained with the already-dark bricks burned black.
There's a good exhibition at the now-deserted Gdansk shipyard on protests against the regime in Poland; everyone knows about the 1980 Solidarity strike, I hadn't heard of the much more violently cracked-down-upon 1956 and 1970 strikes. Lots of contemporary film footage and photography, which as always makes you wonder how the regimes managed to find quite such numbers of straightforwardly violent goons for their Internal Oppression Forces. They're not the regular army; regular armies usually stopped when the strikers suggested that might have been a good idea.
The 'im. Lenin' under the sign on the great gate of the Gdansk shipyard has been removed, and a proud 'S.A.' (equivalent of 'Ltd') put in its place; though I have a feeling that the shipyard went bust some years back.
At the moment, as I think every August, it's the Festival of St Dominic, and the streets are filled with stalls selling amber jewellery (this is the amber capital of the Western Baltic; there is apparently more amber in the amber capital of the Eastern Baltic in Kaliningrad, but you need a Russian visa to go there), clothing, massage armchairs, waffles, exceedingly sharp knives, ice-cream, replica handguns, and things which look like meringues but are in fact made out of hard salty cheese, a sort of denser uber-Wensleydale. You can guess which of these I bought.
Gdansk is much the same, except that Gdansk is rather smaller than Norfolk so the churches get in each others' way rather more. There's one on roughly every other church corner. They're made of brick - this area doesn't really have the geology for stone - and accordingly are ponderously enormous, with stubby towers since any Lego aficionado knows the difficulties of building delicately soaring spires out of brick. Some of them have delicately soaring spires made out of copper and stuck on top of great solid brick pedestals.
Other than churches, there are the houses of rich Hanseatic merchants, built out of monumental brick and then plastered in blues and greens; some of these have turned into fine tea- and chocolate-shops (until today I was unaware how nice pineapple coated with dark chocolate could be), some into museums, some just sit there being placidly Hanseatic at onlookers.
World War Two started here, and (with Nazi troops holed up on one of the peninsulas) pretty much ended here too, so the old town is, understandably, all relatively new; a 'built MDCLI' sign will have been saved from the rubble and proudly re-gilded and inserted into a building once the reconstruction finished in MCMLXXI. I don't think any church roof survived, though most of the massive brick frontages remained with the already-dark bricks burned black.
There's a good exhibition at the now-deserted Gdansk shipyard on protests against the regime in Poland; everyone knows about the 1980 Solidarity strike, I hadn't heard of the much more violently cracked-down-upon 1956 and 1970 strikes. Lots of contemporary film footage and photography, which as always makes you wonder how the regimes managed to find quite such numbers of straightforwardly violent goons for their Internal Oppression Forces. They're not the regular army; regular armies usually stopped when the strikers suggested that might have been a good idea.
The 'im. Lenin' under the sign on the great gate of the Gdansk shipyard has been removed, and a proud 'S.A.' (equivalent of 'Ltd') put in its place; though I have a feeling that the shipyard went bust some years back.
At the moment, as I think every August, it's the Festival of St Dominic, and the streets are filled with stalls selling amber jewellery (this is the amber capital of the Western Baltic; there is apparently more amber in the amber capital of the Eastern Baltic in Kaliningrad, but you need a Russian visa to go there), clothing, massage armchairs, waffles, exceedingly sharp knives, ice-cream, replica handguns, and things which look like meringues but are in fact made out of hard salty cheese, a sort of denser uber-Wensleydale. You can guess which of these I bought.
