Leaving Poland

We've had a really enjoyable, albeit brief, trip to Poland.  There's plenty more to see and do but we're about to head west again, partly because life in a motorhome is getting more tricky as campsites close up for the winter, and partly because we have a parcel to collect from Lübeck post office (we hope).

After our last blog we visited the Slowinski National Park in the north of Poland, on the Baltic coast. Here we spent a lovely day walking through the forest, spotting a red squirrel with the biggest bushy tail we've ever seen, climbing the sand dunes (which apparently move so rapidly that they are “regarded as a curiosity of nature on a European scale” according to our guide book) and strolling along the beach looking for amber.



We continued our way east along the Baltic coast to Gdansk, then cut back inland to Malbork and Torun.  We had a couple of nights in the little town of Znin, then to our current location in Poznan.  The weather has got colder and wetter but we've had enough sunny intervals to get out and about, in fact most of the rain has conveniently fallen during the nights.

Gdansk is spectacular.  Richard has wanted to visit it since he read a couple of Günter Grass novels in the 1980s.  One of the novels described how the old town centre was devastated close to the end of the war, but how the proud townsfolk were determined to rebuild it just as it was (at least those who were able to stay – see below).  They've done a great job of it.

Town Hall, before and after restoration

The old centre is lined with brightly coloured and ornately decorated old houses, but they have also restored (maybe not as thoroughly) the outlying streets so they also have the tall terraces and varied gables of the old city.  It's an atmospheric maze of streets. The limitations of the restoration can be seen here and there; the old carved grave slabs on the floor of the cathedral are almost all cracked and pitted, one house has replaced the pieces they could find of an elaborately carved doorway and it makes a sorry jigsaw.



But the thing they've really been unable to restore is the society.  Grass described a thoroughly mixed and largely harmonious Polish / German city with a lively community.  In modern central Gdansk there's hardly a shop that's selling anything for anyone but the tourists, all the grave slabs in the cathedral bear German names but the only German spoken is by visitors.



Malbork used to be Marienburg, the massive brick fortress HQ of the Teutonic Knights who originally established Prussia.  It was a very important national symbol to Prussia and to newly unified Germany which lovingly restored and embellished it during the 1880s and 1890s. Unfortunately all that restoration work went to waste, as those later German nationalists led by Mr A Hitler also loved it and refused to give it up without a fight. The new Polish owners had to start all over again.  It is a spectacular monument to the power, wealth and piety of that strange band of warrior monks who spread the Good News through the Baltic at the point of a sword.



Torun was unusual amongst the places we visited, as the Red Army seems to have been able to stroll in while no-one was looking and it didn't suffer much damage.  It's a compact mediaeval town with a lot of interesting old buildings. It is also home to a large university population and has a 'young' and educated feel about it. The people we spoke to there in shops and restaurants spoke excellent English and were happy to chat to us and tell us local stories.

Torun.  The Teutonic Knights' outside toilet (seriously!)

 
Since Lübeck it's been Brick Gothic all the way.  Baltic Poland and Germany are built on alluvium, the biggest pieces of rock are glacial boulders rarely bigger than a washing machine.  It's many hundreds of miles to the nearest decent building stone, so their mediaeval houses, cathedrals and fortresses were all built of brick.  It takes some getting used to – at first glance many venerable Gothic buildings looked to us like a Victorian railway station. The lack of building stone had another strange effect – in Malbork some of the 14th century tracery and figures were made from 'artificial stone', something we associate more with the wares of 21st century garden centres.

Poznan Tourist Information gives you a free city guide which starts “While Poznan is not the first city on the travellers itinerary...”.  Cheer up guys!  It's fine!  Nothing to be ashamed of!  The old town is centred on Stary Rynek, the old market square.  This area was also badly damaged in 1945 and rebuilt as a lovely cobbled square surrounded by colourful houses and arcades, decorated with wall paintings and sgrafitto. 

At the centre there's a spectacular renaissance town hall with a clock tower that puts on a little show at noon; a bugler plays and two mechanical goats butt heads 12 times. Stella particularly liked this.

North of the centre there's an area that was redeveloped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a showpiece of modern Prussian style (yes, them again).  It might not be what the Poznan people would have chosen but they've inherited some spectacularly bonkers neo-Gothic buildings as well as a bit of neoclassical and art nouveau which we think they're now quite fond of.

Poland has had a truly horrible history that you wouldn't wish on anyone.  Everywhere we visited up until Znin had been part of Prussia up until 1945, captured by the Red Army, the population expelled and the land handed over to Poland.  I've been very aware that all those elegant Victorian apartment blocks were once occupied by Germans who in 1946 suddenly found themselves in displaced persons' camps (if they were lucky) with no prospect of going home.  They probably didn't find they got much sympathy at the time, because of what their countrymen had been up to for the previous few years.  Poland was carrying out it's first post-war census, and finding that one in three of its people had disappeared. We haven't been to the south of Poland and therefore haven't come close to its most popular tourist destination - Auschwitz. We don't really want to.

Since Poland joined the EU we've heard so many more Polish voices in Britain and seen so many more Polish products in the shops.  It's been great to be able to observe the Poles in their natural habitat!  The flatness of this country has grown a bit wearing, but it's a great place for people with dodgy knees.  It has fantastic old cities (even if some of them were built in 1953), fabulous forests and wildlife, really interesting and delicious food, and remarkably low prices. 

We're going to leave wanting more.  Krakow seems to be one of the main places to see, but we never got that far south. Wrocklau is a hidden gem, so we're told. We were very tempted to make a dash from Gdansk to the border with Belarus to visit the Bialowieza National Park, but decided it needed more time and more planning to make the best of it.

Even the climate, for our visit, has been no worse than Britain.  We have seen the odd snippet of information that reminds us that we can't afford to hang around too long (e.g. the old wooden bridge over the Wisla at Torun kept being damaged by floating ice).  The sky over Torun was still crowded with geese streaming south.



Pretty soon we're going to have to follow them.