Suggestively telling this story is the great film "Law and Fist", which is something of a Polish anti-Western, begins with the song "Before the day rises". This ballad, composed by Krzysztof Komeda, written by Agnieszka Osiecka and sung by Edmund Fetting, is in my opinion one of the best Polish songs. Clint Eastwood is played by a young Gustaw Holoubek in this film, and the black-and-white plot wonderfully captures the specifics and atmosphere of that time and space. It is worth watching this film, because it has not aged, and it is available online free of charge. It is the easiest way to get an initial feel for the atmosphere of Szczecin at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s.
An uncompromising narrative of rude Gocław
Photo: author
Shortly after the war - when Polish universities were already being installed in Breslau and Gliwice, built on the basis of primarily Lvov academic staff, when inGdansk the settlement was led by numerous Poles and Kashubians already living there before the war, when professors from Vilnius were unpacking their suitcases in Torun - almost nothing was happening in Szczecin. Immediately after the war, 1,578 Poles lived in Szczecin's rubble. A destroyed port, a non-functioning steel mill, dead shipyards. The old center razed to the ground. A communication-dead, unintelligible to Poles river Oder. And the Soviets hesitating to whom to finally grant this Szczecin. The GDR authorities fought fiercely for the city, fortunately for us Nikita Khrushchev supposedly did not like them and, as if to spite the Berlin team, finally assigned Stettin to Poland. A bit like he gave Crimea to Ukraine. What does this whole situation mean for contemporary Szczecin and contemporary Poland?
Szczecin's Venice is a complex of waterfront buildings, rising picturesquely directly from the river
Photo: author
Well: among large Polish cities, it is Szczecin that is home to the youngest community in terms of collective identity. It consists of an unusual mix of human characters: adventurers, escapists, all "late for the train" that left a dozen years earlier were drawn to Szczecin. Everything here began later, with an exceptionally deep misunderstanding of the nature of the place, from its natural features to its transportation isolation and Warsaw's peculiar aversion to Szczecin, which is often mentioned here.
This forest of cranes, masts, a feast of hulls ... madness!
Photo: author
For me, a passionate city is not necessarily a good boy. As I immersed myself in Szczecin, I felt more and more that it was a kind of villain. And that's a very good thing - because my reaction to this city became more and more violent.
The Szczecin Philharmonic and the Center for Dialogue "Breakthroughs" - The neighborhood of these works is already some space
Photo: author
After the war, when everyone else in the so-called Recovered Territories had long since rushed forward, Szczecin was stuck welded to the starting blocks, further being consistently looted. When everyone was tentatively trying to make themselves comfortable somehow in the Recovered Territories, feeling the insecurity and strangeness of the places, having fears "whether the Germans would not return," no one was seriously arranging themselves in Szczecin, hardly anything was being built - because it didn't make any sense yet. From this perspective, Szczecin is a city lagging behind in development, but I would not want to be misunderstood here, because perhaps, paradoxically, this lagging will help this city. For past neglect is creating spectacular opportunities today.
To calm my winded urban emotions, I went for a bike ride through Poland's largest park-cemetery, the Central Cemetery, with its forest of large magnificent trees. It's not exactly a cemetery atmosphere: it's quiet, peaceful, very, as it is in Szczecin, spacious. But the trees win over the graves, people do sports here, running, pedaling bikes, just a great place.
Then there was a scan with understanding of the Chrobry Embankment, originally called Hakenterrasse, in honor of the German mayor, creator of this spectacular place, probably the most important today for the identity of the city. Originally, passenger ships sailed directly under these monumental stairs and the architecture piled high - their guests watched the extraordinary spectacle as they disembarked, punctuated by a huge fountain. If I were Szczecin, I would get rid of the carriageways from this place as soon as possible (they need to be given underground, as Düsseldorf has done along the Rhine) and organize a green public space there, preferably restoring this original functionality of the place - let passenger ships dock here again, let people disembark from them directly on these stairs, let the original representative function of the place return.
The monstrous gantry crane on Gryfia Island: the tallest in Poland and one of the tallest in the world, can lift and move objects weighing up to 1,400 tons to a height of 100 metersmeters - it is 130 meters high itself, and on a daily basis is used to put upright and load onto ships the bases for offshore wind power plants manufactured here
Photo: author
Then it's time for my first attack on Szczecin from the water - we take a tourist motorboat to the so-called Szczecin Venice. We sail along Szczecin's islands, the quays are endless, most of this space could be transformed into some incredible version of Copenhagen's waterfront. Szczecin's waterfront is just being born, rising from the dead, but you can already feel what it could be like here in a few years. If architects and urban planners rise to the occasion, Szczecin could have the most spectacular aesthetic and utilitarian transformation of a city I've ever heard of.
We're getting there - Szczecin Venice is a complex of waterfront buildings, rising picturesquely directly out of the river. This place looks phenomenal, although it is, for the time being, an abandoned corpse (which, by the way, as you know, often adds to the charm of the place). There used to be a liquor and yeast factory here. In the future, after revitalization, there will probably be a completely insane complex: residential, hotel or even more, the best thing would probably be to make of it some kind of urban institution, museum, community center, gastro zone. Phenomenal site.
CS CALLA Nassau, Fairplay VI, Zhao Yang Feng: it sounds like a separate language, but what a thoroughbred port city it is - regardless of the size of passing vessels, everyone politely greets each other, waving their paws at each other; Szczecin - the world is here!
Photo: author
I start the next day of exploring Szczecin with a visit to the Maritime Science Center, in this rust-colored super building observed on Lasztownia Island. Inside is, of course, something like the Copernicus Science Center, only with a marine specialty, and rightly so. I still push my bike towards the Breakthroughs Dialogue Center (closed at surprising days and hours, designed by KWK Promes) to saturate my eyes with the lump of the Szczecin Philharmonic Hall (designed by Barozzi Veiga) - I've always liked this place. Here I realized that I had caught some extraordinarily coordinated chemistry with this city.
And then it was off and running. I stopped by a few more of the city's key pubs, moving on to the phase of making contact with the locals - in each case they were great encounters. After a conversation with the city's historical and tourist expert, Ryszard Kotla, and later with Bartek, the owner of my favorite Szczecin pub, King John's Bagels, I already knew that I had fallen in love. It's no secret that I'm pretty much, in the urban sense, a lover, but in this case, as it were, tradition was done. In the early 1990s I fell madly in love with the beautiful Ewa from Szczecin, thirty years later I came to fall in love with Szczecin itself. A day later, we were already sailing with Bartek on Lake Dabie and penetrating the Oder and harbor nooks and crannies from the yacht - my fascination with the city only grew and grew.
Life goes on by the water - the largest waterfront in Poland is being hatched here, and the middle class equipped with standard yachts
Photo: author
No other city in Poland has such a space - only here the harbor is in the heart of the metropolis, the city surrounds the harbor on all sides and looks directly into it. Elsewhere, you have to get to the port, sometimes there is not even really a way to look inside it. Here it is different: you are in Szczecin = you are in the port.
It's time for the so-called revealing truth, or what I look for in every city I visit, study and analyze. Something its inhabitants don't know about it, an observation crucial to understanding its genius loci, and at the same time something lost, lost in the meanders of history, and at the same time essential, obvious to the point of being unaware of it.
The relief of discovery washed over me after four days of investigation, really good days, spent very intensively in Szczecin, a city that is difficult to discover, but when it does, it can be really interesting. Do you know what this revealed truth about Szczecin is? Here a few sentences of introduction are necessary - to fully understand what Szczecin is, we need to deconstruct its modern image and create (reconstruct) a model of its gradual entelechy, i.e. the actual, fundamental, original purpose of the city. The history of old Szczecin is, of course, due to its strategic location at the mouth of a great river. In the Middle Ages, the fate of Szczecin - a Hanseatic city - was shaped similarly to that of other nearby Baltic cities also located in estuaries.
Life goes on by the water - Poland's largest waterfront and a middle class equipped with yachts as standard are being hatched here
Photo: author
Going from Szczecin to the east: Kołobrzeg with the Parsęta, Darłowo with the Wieprza, Ustka in a team with Słupsk on the Słupia, and finally Gdańsk with the Vistula, andeven farther - Königsberg with the Pregel, Klaipeda with the Danga and Riga with the Dvina - all were port cities located in the estuaries of rivers. This is important because the character of the Baltic coast on its southern side is fairly consistent along this stretch - essentially one big sandy beach, which is a result of the prevailing direction of winds in this part of the world. They usually blow from north to south, creating the so-called wind from the sea, which was described, for example, by Zeromski. This is why today's Polish coast is so different from, for example, the Swedish coast, which is rocky and where natural harbors carved precisely in the rock occur. On "our" side of the Baltic there are no such bays - here ports had to be created in the mouths of rivers. This gave rise to certain consequences: the cities had access to fresh water, the rivers silted up, so access to the sea was variable, and at the same time the rivers were arteries for transporting goods from inland. This created various interesting configurations throughout history that determined the fate of the cities along these rivers. In some simplification, however, it can be said that the larger the river was, the more important was the city lying at its mouth. The Vistula, for example, gave the rival tandem of Gdansk-Elblag access to a monopoly on the export of goods from its entire basin. The Oder, on the other hand, gave Szczecin a chance to handle the stream of goods from Lower Silesia and the rest of its basin. This was a huge deal, if only because of the importance of Wroclaw, which was becoming an important economic player in that part of the world around the 15th century. However, until the twilight of the power of the Jagiellonian empire, it was the Vistula that was arguably the most economically important river in the world, and it was the river that provided the immeasurable importance and caliber of Gdansk, the largest port on the Baltic.
Life goes on by the water - Poland's largest waterfront and a middle class equipped with yachts as standard are being hatched here
Photo: author
Later, however, the mills of history grinded reality. Business on the Vistula died down, marginalizing the role of ports in Gdansk and Elblag. The collapsed Commonwealth caused a crisis that affected the aforementioned ports and their cities. Today we may not be fully aware of it, but Gdansk and Elblag had their golden days with the peak of the First Republic's power, after that it was rather fragile with them.
