★ Town · Gdańsk, Sopot and GdyniaGdyniaA port city that grew in a few years from a fishing village, with one of the most consistent modernist centres in Europe.
The storyAfter the First World War Gdańsk became a free city under the League of Nations, and reborn Poland, which had only a short stretch of coast, decided to build a port of its own. From 1921 the village of Gdynia was turned into a modern port and a city of 120,000 people, built almost entirely in the 1920s and 1930s in the modernist style: white buildings with rounded corners reminiscent of ships, balconies and porthole windows. In 2015 the centre was declared a national historic monument.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ History and art · The Baltic coastKlukiAn open-air museum on the shores of Lake Łebsko that preserves the farmsteads of a vanished people, the Slovincians.
The storyThe Slovincians were Slavic-speaking fishermen and farmers, related to the Kashubians, who lived among the lakes and marshes of this coast. Isolated for centuries and subjected to Germanisation, by the early 20th century they had almost forgotten their language; after 1945 the last of them were moved to Germany. The museum, founded in 1963, preserves the half-timbered houses, stables, nets and tools of the village of Kluki, one of their last centres.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ History and art · KashubiaKartuzyThe capital of Kashubia, with the Gothic church of a former charterhouse whose roof is shaped like a coffin lid.
The storyCarthusian monks came here in 1380, invited by a Gdańsk nobleman, and founded a monastery among the lakes and woods; the town takes its name from them. The church's 18th-century Baroque roof was built in the shape of a coffin lid to remind monks and worshippers of the order's motto, memento mori, remember that you must die. The town also has the Kashubian Museum, devoted to the culture and language of this minority.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ History and art · KashubiaWdzydze KiszewskieThe oldest open-air museum in Poland: Kashubian wooden houses, mills, churches and schools on a peninsula of Lake Wdzydze.
The storyIn 1906 a teacher, Izydor Gulgowski, and his wife Teodora, a painter, bought a 17th-century farmhouse in Wdzydze to save it and opened it to the public with the furniture and objects of Kashubian life: it was the first museum of its kind in the Polish lands. Today the museum has about fifty buildings, including a wooden church, and on festival days you can watch embroiderers, potters and fishermen at work.
Full page, why go and what's nearby →★ History and art · Malbork and the lower VistulaPelplinA small town with a huge Gothic Cistercian abbey and a museum that holds the only Gutenberg Bible in Poland.
The storyCistercian monks settled here in 1276 and built one of the largest Gothic brick churches on the Baltic, with Baroque stalls and altars. The diocesan museum holds a copy of the Bible printed by Gutenberg in Mainz around 1455. In 1939 the Bible was smuggled out of occupied Poland through Romania, France and England to Canada, together with the Wawel tapestries; it only returned to Pelplin in 1959.
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