Tri-Cities. What are the New Bourgeois waiting for?
The New Bourgeois - a vision of the contemporary identity of the Tri-City resident
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Until the outbreak of the war, the exclusive resort of Zoppot between Gdansk and Gdynia lived with its own rhythm, life went on here at a different pace, in an atmosphere of walks on the pier and thethe beach, horse races, banquets at the Spa House, baths taken at the bathhouse, roulette at the casino, concerts at the Forest Opera House and spa treatments.
The Forest Opera House, as the name suggests, is one of the proofs of the forested nature of the Tricity
photo: Maciej Wróblewski
From the pier, the haughty gazes of the German social cream were directed toward the brazen Gdynia, defying all stereotypes, breaking the pattern on which the fascist Germans built their sense of superiority - not only over Poles, but over the whole world.
Danzig, who was brimming with Zoppot, sincerely hated Gdynia. Gdynia took away his prosperity, marginalized him, humiliated him. After all, Danzig had until recently been a great power, since the Middle Ages the biggest player in the entire Hanseatic League next to Lübeck, a funnel into which all the wealth of Poland poured via the Vistula during the years of its Golden Age. Between the 14th and 17th centuries - a fact few people realize today - Gdansk was, along with the Vistula basin, the most economically important place... in the world. These were times when the role of the trading powers of Venice and Genoa was already diminishing, and the colonial economic powers had not yet fully blossomed. The continent's largest export of construction timber was going through Danzig; spruce, the English name for spruce, was, according to some linguists, simply "from Prussia," a word that appeared on the thousands of wooden trunks, logs, beams and planks unloaded from Hanseatic League ships. How significant was this? Well, very - Europe at the time was stripped of its forests, without this wood there would have been no thousands of boats, ships and buildings across Europe, no great geographical discoveries and no world as we know it today.
Sopot's pier still remains the longest such structure on the Baltic Sea
photo: visit360.pl
There were many more strategic commodities here - the largest food exports in Europe also flowed from Gdansk. The staple of the diet was bread, and 1/3 of that on the continent was made from grain purchased from Danzig granaries, which stored hundreds of thousands of tons of mostly wheat, oats and rye. Hundreds of seagoing ships and thousands of inland vessels transporting the world's largest stream of goods entered Gdansk annually - in addition to those already mentioned, all the salt from Bochnia and Wieliczka, thousands of tons of tar, potash, tar, copper and lead flowed through here. It may be hard to believe, but this is how the world looked back then - it was not the Huang He or Yangtze, the Danube, the Rhine, the Seine or the Thames, but the Vistula was the most economically important river in the world at the time, and Danzig got incredibly rich from it. It's no coincidence that Danzig's St. Mary's Basilica (for almost four hundred years an Evangelical!) is one of the largest brick buildings in the world by volume. It's no coincidence that Gdansk's Crane is the largest medieval harbor crane on the planet. These are still visible today as symbols of the power of the time. What a city it was!
Dominated for centuries by German-speaking bourgeoisie, it was not, however, simply German. Many Poles lived here, plenty of Kashubians, a cosmopolitan crowd loomed in the port, hundreds and thousands of Englishmen, Dutchmen, sailors and merchants from all over the known world. The sole supplier of goods via the Vistula was the huge and powerful Jagiellonian State at the time. It is worth emphasizing again here - at that time simply the strongest European power.
The panorama of Gothic Gdansk is a reminder of the Golden Age and the times of the Hanseatic League
photo: Jerzy Pinkas
Wealthy Gdansk was sometimes a Polish ally, but at other times its assertiveness and monopoly position led to tensions. They culminated in the Polish-Gdansk War of 1577, after which Gdansk experienced the taste of losing its monopoly for the first time in its history. King Stefan Batory directed Polish exports to the port of Elblag, which expanded rapidly, taking over almost all of Gdansk's hitherto commercial maritime business. A souvenir of those days is today's magnificent Elblag's Nówka-Starówka, about which I wrote more in the 05/2021 issue of A&B.
King Stefan Batory was quite a player; his name on the beautiful hulls of the two generations of the most important Polish transatlantic ships that ran between Gdynia and New York was there for a reason. From a historical perspective, Batory was one of the most important rulers in Polish history, not only because he was the only one who successfully pacified Danzig's arrogance and disloyalty. He was also Batory's conqueror of Ivan the Terrible, who stopped Russian expansion into Europe for many years. This sounds unpleasantly current today, doesn't it?
So Gdansk declined for a while, then regained some vigor with the changing economy and geopolitical situation. However, it never again enjoyed such glory and power as in the days of the Hanseatic League and cooperation with the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom.
The Prussian and German times have come and gone, and we have reached (somewhat abbreviated) the present day. The somewhat outmoded and somewhat shabby Danzig and the very fashionable and intimate post-World War I Zoppot are neighboring in harmony and harmony within the strange creation called the Free City of Danzig. Gdynia, which grew up next door, plays a role similar to that of Elblag nearly four hundred years earlier - it stifles the development of a neighbor and port rival hostile to Poland.
War breaks out, and as we know - after heroic resistance - Gdynia is captured by the Germans. A decision is made to evict all Polish residents from it. Settled by German newcomers, it is rather brazenly named during the war Gotenhafen - the Port of the Goths... This is an attempt to capture Gdynia's modernity by German propaganda; the Germans are made to believe that this super-modern city is the work of Nazi genius. Fortunately, after six of the longest years in the history of the world, the Port of Goths becomes the Port of Poles again. As the dust of battle settles, a Germanized and deserted Gdynia emerges, with a harbor whose entrance is blocked by the sunken giant wreck of the battleship Gneisenau.
